Creating Illuminated Letters

While working on the website for Brahms Bookworks I created some illuminated letters in Photoshop. Here's a tutorial about how I did that. The finished letter can be further detailed by hand with gilding or gold paint after it is printed. But if you create an alphabet this way, the letters can be used over and over again in a hand made book.

Here's a cool trick that's not in the tutorial. After the letter is colored digitally, play with "image/adjustment/hue/saturation"...slide the hue scroll back and forth and see the variations of color you can achieve with a single color scheme.

Here's the tutorial.

Ziggy

I'm in love!! We got a new dog last week. He's an 8 month old, very bright poodle, who we named Ziggy. Neither Jon or I have ever owned a dog before so we were unprepared for the heart stealing, tail wagging, tiny tongue kisses up the nose, so happy to see us in the morning we can't stand it, kind of puppy behavior. :::sigh::: So of course we had to take him down to the studio and make a fairy portrait! Isn't he the cutest? Did I tell you how bright he is? And cute???

...and in a fairy scene.

Brahms Bookworks

Yeah! I just finished a new web site revision for Brahms Bookworks. Brahm makes incredible old world style grimoires with handcrafted hinges, padlocks and medallions. Brahm and Robyn are the nicest people around and we all love the way the site turned out. :)
Check it out here: Brahms Bookworks

Alphabet Blocks

A while ago I bought a bunch of unfinished wooden blocks, intending to create something out of them.
Well yesterday I took them out and played with them a bit. I remember as a child, playing with wooden blocks with pictures on them...I think they were farm animals. And then of course there were the wooden alphabet blocks we all played with. (Before the age of legos. :-)

So I used the 2" cubes as a base for little 2" simple collages. First I sanded down the sharp edges to make them look old and worn. And then I stained them using one of those distress ink pads by Jim Holtz.

While they were drying a little I chose some papers from Basic Grey and Cosmo Cricket and cut out some 2' squares. I used these as backgrounds for little collages. On some of the block faces I used plain graphics, some have a simple letters that I printed on my inkjet and cut out, and some are odd little juxtapositions of images.

They're not quite finished. I want to sand the paper edges to integrate it into the wood, then stain them again and seal the surfaces with Modge Podge Hard Coat. Its supposed to dry harder than regular Modge Podge. I don't want the blocks to stay tacky or they'll stick to each other.

Making these is like eating popcorn! I can't stop. I keep wanting to take it in another direction...and I have lots of blocks. Wouldn't this be a fun project for a trade?
I'm off to suggest it at my Paper Traders group. Anyone want to join us? You can apply here!