Aunt Nan's Eclectic Inkandblabula: Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm looking forward to spending the part of the day at the home of my son Jeremy's sister- and brother-in-law, Karen and Raja Aburri. It is great fun to be with this really global extended family; if you look around, you can see so many different ethnicities--it is wonderful! And the dinner is potluck, so you can believe that the food for the traditional feast is truly awesome! I hope your Thanksgiving will be a wonderful as I know mine is going to be.

Yesterday and Monday I was taking classes at creativelive.com from the redoubtable Lesa Snider, an expert in Photoshop. Her web site is http://photolesa.com/ The Monday class was on Bridge, Adobe's image (and other file) organizer. What a revelation that class was! And if you are not familiar with Creative Live, it is an online classroom which hosts awesome teachers in various graphic fields, and the classes are free! If, like me, your head starts to explode by the end of the first half hour, you can buy the class vids, which you can either watch on their site, or download, or either--or both, come to that! I have not regretted any of my class purchases either!

Yesterday's class had me fascinated from the very beginning--but I was interrupted when my husband called on his cell phone for help--and he truly needed it. He was pretty well unresponsive, so over his protests I called 911. The EMTs took him off to the hospital, where he was kept overnight for observation. Turns out he was dehydrated--a thing that happens to us seniors all too often, because we apparently don't feel thirsty like we used to. So any of you seniors out there, take heed! Keep drinking that water, even if you aren't prompted by thirst! Anyhow, needless to say, my class time was cut off after the first hour! Luckily, Creative Live does a rewatch, so I was able to get some of the information on Blending Modes in Photoshop, and even played with them a bit before I went to bed.

Here are some of the results:

I used various free textures downloaded from folks like Lost and Taken, Valleys in the Vinyl, and Shadowhouse, as well as photos I took myself.

Maybe you can see how the layers changed as I tried different blend modes--most of them have a different blend mode on each layer.

For most of them, I only used blend modes; but for one or two, I did use level adjustments and some filters.

And on one or two I used Invert and some color adjustments with the Hue/Saturation slider.

All in all, there are 35 iterations so far.

Some of them are pretty similar.

And some are radically different.

An otherworldly portrait.

I did have fun! Lesa suggests accompanying this kind of experimenting with a beverage of choice--and come to think of it, that would have been a good idea! But I missed the martini truck, darn it!