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Cup of blues

Cup of blues

It’s no secret that I love my blue hydrangeas, unfortunately I have trouble growing them, they all seem to revert to pink unless I sprinkle Aluminium Sulphate around the plant and I’m hopeless at remembering to do this, the result, pink hydrangeas this year! So while I was out on one of my daily walks I appropriated a small sprig of this beautiful blue specimen which was growing over a fence by the footpath,  put it in a tiny cup and shot from directly above.

Road to Carcassonne

Road to Carcassonne

Welcome to the first blog with the new Ethereal Textures used!
They say all roads lead to Rome, well this one more so as its a typical Roman road that leads from Carcassonne to Rome.
I just shot this quick view on my Iphone from the roundabout at Capestang, it was captured in a bitter north-westerly lunchtime wind but the processing makes it look like evening!

Ethereal Painterly Launch

Ethereal Painterly Launch

Welcome to the launch of our first Textures Pack of the year with our Ethereal Painterly Textures!
This packs launch coincides with a rare planetary alignment going on right now and so its theme perfectly matches our Ethereal textures names!
We have found 50 heavenly bodied names to perfectly describe our soft, smokey ethereal textures.

Pretty

Pretty

It’s been a while since we’ve had some floral prettiness here on the blog!  This was taken in our New Zealand spring a few months back. The flowers grow over the fence just down the hill from where I live and I couldn’t resist picking a sprig while passing, I’ve no idea what they are but they’re a beautiful subject, especially when paired with one of my little oriental styled teacups.

Catlins

Catlins

During the recent summer holidays we paid a visit to the Catlins, a beautiful unspoilt coastal area to the south of Dunedin. The day we visited it wasn’t very summery, but looking on the bright side, the overcast showery conditions did lead to wonderfully moody photos, the kind that are so good for texturing. After a walk to Jacks Blowhole  (stunning coastal views but a fairly chilly walk since I was dressed for summer); we stopped for lunch at a bay at the mouth of the Catlins River

the vacancy

the vacancy

Welcome to our first blog of 2016, here’s to hoping you, our Dear reader, had a good Xmas and New Year? 🙂
Just going through my old external hard drives and came across this Eastbourne shoot I’ve dipped into many times and was even lucky enough to sell a few, the last was to the UK Guardian newspaper.

Cliff Cottages

Cliff Cottages

Just came across this image that I’ve so far never processed, I think I tried before but couldn’t balance out the heavy bottom part properly, though some would perhaps say I still haven’t!

Hotel Concorde

Hotel Concorde

Welcome to the first Cracks blog, with a bit of a graphical bent, because over the last weekend I found myself both homeless and then booked into this Hotel courtesy of our local Mayor of Beziers, M. Robert Menard who met us outside the house and was both charming and sympathetic after a huge fire in the adjoining property made their towering party wall unsafe and liable to fall and crush our house. I was lucky because I was already planning on driving up to the Jura on the Sunday so only had to rough it for two nights and our two cats were reasonably happy in my renovation project house around the corner.

Fine Cracks Pack Launch

Fine Cracks Pack Launch

We’ve had a crazy time crackle glazing this summer and here with the autumnal fruits of our labours we’d like to present a first ever Fine Cracks Pack!
This set was made following on from our Distressed Painterly set, a natural progression to more or less round off where we started, we wanted much finer, smaller sized cracks in this set plus several PNG transparent overlay versions so this has fewer plates but with the mixed Jpg and much larger PNG files it adds up to just as many megs.

Winter Rose

Winter Rose

t’s been a while..sorry! Blame holidays and suchlike. You’ll be pleased to know spring is finally starting to spring here in southern New Zealand (though it doesn’t feel much like it today)! There’s not a great deal in flower in my garden yet, but the Hellebores more commonly called winter roses are in flower, they start flowering midwinter and brighten the garden when there’s not much else around. I picked some and discovered they aren’t the best as cut flowers but before they drooped I did manage to photograph them.