flower

Aquilegia

Aquilegia

Once again apologies for the lack of recipe blog posts recently, we’ve been very busy with pack launches and suchlike, hopefully we’ll be posting more here soon, I know Paul has some lovely ones to share with you but in the meantime, another flower!

These aquilegia also have the very apt common name of Granny’s Bonnets, you can just imagine granny in her pretty pastel blue bonnet! Another common name for them is columbine, which apparently comes from the Latin for dove as the inverted flower resembles 5 doves crowded together.

Softness

Softness

Sorry it’s been such a long time since our last post! We’ve both been busy with more important things like holidays:-) I have spent a lovely 10 days on the tiny Pacific Island of Niue, it’s such a relaxing and laid back kind of place and I’d love to return some day. I took lots of photos but most didn’t do the place justice and most aren’t really suitable for textures so you may not see them here, but if you picture coconut palms,  very clear water, rock pools to snorkel or swim in  and whales that you can see from the shore you’ll get an idea of what Niue is like.

Hydrangea Blue

Hydrangea Blue

Not another hydrangea I hear you saying 🙂 I’m of the opinion that you can never have too many! They’re such photogenic flowers especially my favourite blue variety. This was textured with a mix of old and new Flypapers, one texture came from our ever popular Summer painterly pack and one from the brand new Distressed Painterly.

Blue

Blue

You’ll be pleased to know that the Hydrangea that I planted last season has remained blue! So I’m happy! I’m now hoping the bush will grow a bit bigger now and have a mass of flowers to brighten a fairly bland corner of my garden. While we’re on the hydrangea subject, I was given another hydrangea bush for Christmas which I planted it at our country hut. Unfortunately when the river that borders the property is low, the sheep from the paddock over the fence can get in via the river bank and this is what they did a month or so back. They ate everything; hosta, roses, flax bushes, potatoes, they even nibbled on

Spring flower

Spring flower

I hope you’re all enjoying the new Pastel Painterly Textures as much as we are? I’m finding its textures particularly easy to use and not just for my usual flowers and still-lifes either, the pastels are working well on landscapes and beaches too!

Vintage Hydrangea

Vintage Hydrangea

I am enjoying the versatility of our new Flypaper metallics, I love the light metallic sheen that some of them give to photos depending on the blending mode and opacity of the texture layer, this adds a whole new dimension. In this shot of a single hydrangea floret on an old mirror, I combined the metallics with one of our tintype edges, they work so well together!

White rose

White rose

  Winter is starting to show itself here in southern New Zealand so to get my flower fix I had a trawl of my archives and found this rose which cried out for the additon of some texture. It's a lovely easy recipe today utilising just two textures. Aqua Vita @...

Dark Rose

Dark Rose

  A recipe for this one was requested by our friend Ann over on flickr and we were happy to oblige. As you can see the image started out as a scan once again, you can also see how dusty my scanner is at the moment...it all adds to the texture! I started by...

Tintype Hydrangea

Tintype Hydrangea

  I hope you're all enjoying playing with the wonderful new Tintype Edges as much as we are. They're going to be very versatile especially if you want an authentic vintage look. Paul and I have been experimenting with scanning things on our flatbed scanners and...

Hydrangea Blues

Hydrangea Blues

Paul always manages to write such interesting posts when he blogs, but with my flowers I struggle to think of anything to write, I'm just getting over a nasty bout of the flu at the moment which probably won't help my blog writing. I especially like blue hydrangeas...