WET #55: Holiday Wreath! December 5, 1999 WET 55: Holiday Wreath! This wreath is made from all of the WET 55 images, and nothing else! We had a lovely collection of images this week from Janice. They included a tiled background, a peony, a golden fish, a man-o-war, a cartoon turkey, a gorgeous fractal, and a lighthouse. Hmmmm. Well that lighthouse made me think of a candle, and the trees at its base made me think of holiday greenery...and so, this wreath was born! My first project was to make the wreath. I selected the lighthouse and candle as a single section, then used rotated selections of just the trees to make the complete wreath. When I had completed the circle, I made another copy of the wreath and rotated it 30 degrees as another layer to make thicker greenery. Both wreaths were dropshadowed some to blend them together. For the candle, I hotwaxed a separate copy of the lighthouse (after filling in the windows) and used the motion deformation at a slight angle to get a more waxy texture. The candle's flame was created from the fractal. I first deformed with "vertical perspective" to make the base narrower. Then I rotated a copy of this 90 degrees on a large transparent image. I narrowed the other end a bit with horizontal perspective, then selected "wind" deformation from the left to make the "flame" stretch and thin out. I rotated the image back to the vertical, then copied it as a new layer to place it on the candle. Once this basic wreath was made, the fun really started: making the ornaments! I put each kind of ornament on a separate layer, dropshadowing (and highlighting if necessary) each layer. The gold fish was mirrored and layered with heads overlapped and blended at 100 darken. The man-o-war was color adjusted, then mirrored, layered, overlapped and blended at 100 hard light to create the butterfly, complete with body! The jewel-like ornaments were created by circle deforming the fractal, flipping a copy, blending at 100 lighten, then using color adjustments to get the bright red and light gold colors. The square framed ornaments were created by taking a single repeat of the background tile, colorizing one copy gold, resizing (smaller) and colorizing another copy red, then pasting the red one (flipped) on the gold one. An interesting note here is that the compression resulting from saving as a jpg gave a much more fluid look to this ornament than it has in the original. For the peony ornament, first I adjusted the HSL of the original to get a red blossom. Next, I selected a feathered circle on a transparent background, filled the circle with a cream color, inverted the selection and drop shadowed and highlighted the circle for depth. I placed the circles where I wanted them, then pasted a copy of the peony on each one, mirroring, flipping, and/or rotating each to get a variety of positions. All of the above layers were merged, then a copy of the image (1200 x 1200 pixels at this point!) was reduced to 50% (smart resize), sharpened once, drop shadowed again, and placed on the background image. For the background, I used the cartoon turkey, pasting several copies on one image, then using the "mosaic" function at 1 pixel wide and 213 pixels high. I selected one of the two resulting horizontal bands, and used it to fill the background. Everything on this page was done in Paint Shop Pro 5, using only the original filters and functions supplied with the program.

This is a smaller version of the original image posted for us to use. Thank you!

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This image was created using Paint Shop Pro 5, especially for the WET #55 project.
It is my original creation based on the original WET images obtained on-line from Janice
through alt.binaries.comp-graphics.
Thank you!

5acreart@usa.net

All original graphics on this site
Copyright 1999
by Diane at
Five Acre Graphics