This was seriously fun!

Once again I am short on inspiration so I have delved into my seemingly endless stack of Somerset Studio back issues. One article I keep coming back to is one about altering photos by sanding away the background on a photograph and then painting the sanded parts with splooshes of paint.

My late dog Kodi had these magnificent blue eyes. Some days they'd look like a really deep blue and other days they'd look like ice with a hint of the sky reflected. So the three shades of blue were natural for the background.

HERE'S HOW:
I just dipped my finger in the acrylic paint and smudged the paint around until it looked good. I did the medium shade first, then the lightest shade, then the darkest, then I used the medium shade to smudge the dark shade a little bit. Then I took one of my large embossing stylus' and dipped it into some gesso and made the white dots.

There's no particular reason for using the gesso except for my laziness. My paint container is currently buried under a mountain of paper and my gesso was within arm's reach. See? Lazy. lol


I did the white dots just because I thought there needed to be a pattern. Then my friend Amberlee said it looked like snow. Yeah, she's right. I must have been remembering way back in the forgotten recesses of my brain how much Kodi loved the snow. Naturally, he was a Siberian Husky. But towards the last four years of his life he did give the mountains of snow in the back yard some mighty evil looks. I think he was just thinking "I'm getting too old for this".

So don't be afraid!! If you have a photo where the subject looks good but the background looks crappy..... give it a try! Sand off that background (very fine grit sand paper) and paint a background that looks WAY cooler than what you started with. I started with a patio that had weeds between every block. Yucky! Now it looks ready for an altered book page.

And I think I know which one. GRIN