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Snapped photos of some marigolds from the garden, erased the background on Photoshop and then popped them into Corel Painter and used oil brushes to repaint them. Back into Photoshop for a cleanup, and here they are.

Then played around a bit with filters to see if enhancing them further would give me extra-ordinary results. Came up with the result below and I do like it, though I think I prefer the colours and contrasts of the original above. Still, there's something slightly crazy about the version below that appeals to the 'need-to-experiment-more' side of my nature that's demanding my attention at present.

Wishing you a bright, extraordinary day. Cheers.

Now that I've started on a cupcakes theme, I'm going all the way with it this week! So I doodled some quirky cupcakes ... they're a bit odd, whimsical, playful and lots of fun to draw. I doodled flower cupcakes, a sailboat cupcake, coffee cupcakes, a heart cupcake, a colourful iced cupcake, one with a cherry on the top, and even a landscape cupcake with mountains and a stream ... Here are the doodles:

I then scanned them in and started working on them individually. Don't like the bottom left and bottom right ones too much so those will be scrapped, but I think the rest might make for a cute pattern and as individual images to place on cards and gifts. So I made sure I scanned in a relatively high resolution and went to work on the rest. Here are what I've done so far with the first two ...

A pretty pink Daisy cupcake, and ...

... an orange Rose cupcake. What do you think? I digitally 'painted' them and cleaned up edges and finally applied a photoshop filter. I normally repaint them using Corel Painter 12 but since my last Mac OS update that no longer works, which is truly disappointing. I'm hoping that they catch up on the updates soon as I do miss it, but meanwhile, photoshop handled these cupcakes pretty well.

I'm still working on the rest of them. I may post those once I'm done. Cheers.

I usually doodle into a small moleskine journal that sits beside me and gets picked up whenever I have to wait for something to happen, such as when I'm uploading large images to one of my stores. I've been flipping through its pages recently, and found this tree silhouette, so of course decided to see if I could take it a bit beyond its scribbly confines to and use it on cards or gifts somewhere somehow ... Here's the original sketch, warts and all:

And here are some of the steps I worked on. First I 're-painted' the background digitally so it wouldn't look so marker-pen-ish:

I then had the brilliant (debatable I know) idea of working on the tree itself:

And finally, as I have Valentine's Day ideas in mind, I carved a heart on the trunk ...

All of the above was done in Corel Painter 12 (I love it!) and Adobe Photoshop. I'm a mere beginner at both but I couldn't live without them now.

I'm still undecided as to which one to use or whether to use it at all, though I guess I could put up some cards with the carved heart on it and see if anyone would like that for Valentine's Day. Would you send it to someone you loved? Cheers.