2010 Christmas Cards

The bottom image shows a composite design I made from photos of succulent plant we have in our yard. I finally identified it as an ice plant. It grows well here in Tucson, and has pretty little red flowers, so I thought it would work well for holiday creations. This image could work well for a calendar or placemat.
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The middle image is my Christmas card for 2010 with the Merry Christmas salutation. The top image is an alternate version with a Season's Greetings salutation.
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RERERENCE: i144,145,146 t117

Loa Tzu Quote on Still Mind

Brian posted this on facebook a couple of weeks ago and I use it here with a star made from succulent foliage. I posted in as this week's illustrated thought on my Tidbits From Tucson blog. I am posting it here to add the text to our list. I am not referencing the star, as it is used as an element in larger designs and is not meant to stand by itself. If you ever want a print made with one of these star designs, I would be happy to fill your order.
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REFERENCE: t117

Flower Outline Stars

There is a soc/rec program here that makes their own Christmas cards every year to send to its members. Last year, I offered to let them use my Christmas Cactus design, but they declined because it was full color and would have used to much ink. So this year, I wanted to offer them something more cost efficient, and created this black & white star using outlines of cosmos flowers.
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I don't know if they will use it, but in the process; I developed a technique which will have wide applications. There are endless possibilities here for beautiful and interesting designs. The top image shows that these can be colorized. This could be useful for t shirts, where the detail in some of my complex photographic designs doesn't work so well. I like making t shirts because it is fun to combine the images with sayings, but some of my designs don't translate well to fabric, so this may be a solution.
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One could create these stars using the outlines of all kinds of textures and objects, but the idea of using flowers works especially well for me. One could also use freehand lines and shapes; as well as all kinds of geometric patterns, shapes, and designs.
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The other new technique I developed here was a new way of doing fills. I have tried several ways, and ones which give you a separate color fill as a layer are nice in that they are easy to change with color overlay. I used that method with the butterflies as demonstrated earlier.
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Here, I created the outline and then merged it down with a white or colored solid background. I then used the magic eraser to remove the color around the star. That gives me the star as a separate layer. By saving the outline in an original file as a separate layet, I can repeat the process to get any color I want.
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This is important, because if you try to overlap flowers to make the triangular cutouts, the lines overlap. Sometimes, that can create interesting patterns, but it can also create a mess.
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So experiment and see what you can come up with. You can bet I will.