The art journal word prompt this week is bliss. The first thing that came to mind was ignorance is bliss, but I think “Innocence is Bliss” would be kinder and more accurate for children. So, that is the underlying theme, but the photo painting is hopefully making you think of a cool breeze warmed with sunshine on a fresh spring day.

I’ve done a scrapbook layout with other photos taken on this day. It was taken on the first day of spring in 2009 at a graveyard. The building is sort of an old gatehouse made with rough stonework and it has an amazing red wood door. You can see the door from the road on the way to my husband’s work. It was calling my name every time I drove by…so one day I took the girls on a photo shoot. I told them it was castle ruins. It just added to the magic of spring.

I decided to take my husband’s recent advice to a friend and “not pull a Gilligan.” I asked him what in the world he meant and his answer made me laugh out loud. He said Gilligan and team never tried the same thing twice. If a boat didn’t work then the next time they’d try a plane. That they had a bunch of great ideas, but they never stuck with any idea long enough to perfect it.

So, I decided to keep working on my digital painting technique, using my own photography as the canvas.

This time I started with a wonderful freebie glass plate negative. I used a few variations actually, stamping them in different shades of cream/tan/brown.

I drew an outline around the girls, tree, door and some bricks in a brown color. Then I clipped the picture to a glass plate negative, merged the two layers and used it as my “paint”. I made a new layer under that layer and “painted” the majority of my “painting” using a bunch of free brushes from the BitBox site (thanks to someone in the Caravan forum for posting about them.) And, added the distressed scrolls from BitBox on a layer above the “painting.”

Then I used Kim DeSmet’s bright grunge papers as paint over the photo layer. I painted highlights with a yellow paper and used a pink paper for a nice color cast and slight texture. This helped it look more like a painting and less like a photo.

I used the cloning tool with the original photo as reference to paint in shadows on the dresses. And Kim’s pink paper helped make their faces more painterly.

Finally I started adding some bling and dimension with elements from New Life Dreams and Jofia Devoe. In the end I decided to stylize it just a tad more by making my “drawing” and text have a bit of bling, using Microferk’s glitter styles.

Here is the original photo for reference.

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