Muses playground.

I've just done a new post for Muses Playground - http://musesplayground.posterous.com/variations-on-a-theme-nature

Apologies byw for the lack of regular posts anywhere - I've been in North Wales with little or no cellular data signal.

Muses Playground - challenge 8

We've all finished our submissions for the 8th challenge over at Muses' Playground, I was the last to finish and my post is here.

Warning - this post contains gifs...

My plan, as I told Spyros earlier in the week, is to do one post a week that gathers together that weeks creative output and goes into detail about the process behind one of the images.
This week has been mostly spent trying to finish my 'Muses' Playgorund' challenge. I've placed it first in this week's gallery and for more information about it, surf over to the playground.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The 'reality sucks' graphic came about from a chat with @ArtDream on Twitter, I'll upload it to Vector magic at some point and add it to my Graphic Words shop.

Like most Apple admirers I'm excited about the 4S, mostly because I'm 'still' using a 3GS. Last weekend I gave up waiting for Orange to ring me and started to research the cheapest way to get one. Most of this was done via the wonderful Money Saving Expert site. In preparation for the day that I get my eager hands on one I dedicde to design a cover for myself. I love the effects that can be achieved with the Fluid Motion app, so started with that. Here's a gif of some of the images I captured. (Yes, this week I discovered Giff Boom.)  

None of the screen captures was just what I was looking for, so I started to layer different ones using Juxtaposer. When I had an image I was pleased with I opened it on my laptop in Paint Shop Pro. Resized it; (to 300dpi which is what most POD sites demand. Although I know that there's a lot of discussion about whether that's actually relevant.) using bicubic sampling at the smoother end of the range, used unsharpen mask and then because I wanted the image smoky and smooth I used the remove noise filter twice. Finally I added the texture of wet fallen leaves and then added some text. Here's the Juxtaposer montage next to an image of a case with the final design on.

I've also been playing with some recent images to make a few gifs with Gif Boom, here they are;

See the full gallery on Posterous

*EDIT - For some reason when viewing with Chrome you have to click on each of the images for the gif to work. It works automatically with FireFox (or did) Let me know if there are any other browser problems, thanks.