Wetland Friends & Wacom Signature

 

White-winged Dove

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After a long absence from my favourite wetland rookery, I stopped by in recent travels. It was tempting to show every species I happened to take a picture of that day because it was so varied, but here is a sampling of wetland life with a couple of new visitors. The first two images are of White-winged Doves which I had never seen at the rookery before. There were quite a few scattered about the pond apple trees blending well with the muted colors of the winter branches. I do not think they were there to nest and after a couple of passes along the boardwalk they were all gone. It is early in nesting season but you could hear a chorus of Great Blue Heron chicks in the distance and other species too were nest sitting or looking for mates. The usual herons were present along with some friends pictured here including a business-like Green Heron in the dappled shadows, a hungry squirrel on a floor of pine needles, a baby gator looking out over its swampy domain, and a purple gallinule in an unusual location within a tree rather than feasting on fire-flag or pickerel weed flowers.

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Besides the images I thought it might be interesting to show that I finally have my own signature on all of these images instead of my usual fun with fonts for a signature. My son gave me a Wacom tablet for Christmas, an Intuos CTH-490, which is very helpful for that sort of thing. Here is a Wacom link for the product line: Wacom Intuos . Their products are wonderful for artists much more advanced with digital art than I am. But, I am looking forward to seeing what this little tablet will enable me to do. I don’t think free handing birds will be one of those things. 🙂 That is why I have to use a camera! You can certainly digitize your signature by writing with a marker in black on a white sheet of paper and scan or photograph it and put it in Photoshop to lay over images. Or you could make a Photoshop signature brush. But, with the tablet hooked up to your computer you can actually write onto a blank layer with a transparent background in Photoshop. Of course, I am not particularly fond of the way I write and so stacked up a few layers before I decided which one I’d start out with. I always have wanted a cool signature…one of those signatures which is art in of itself. With these images I brought over my signature layer and made it into a smart object so I could size it down on the fly. The signature is black so I just used blending for a color overlay so the signature was complementary in color or tone to the image. I found it looked too thin in some cases so used stroke in the same color to thicken the lines. Next time I will use a thicker brush or pen in Photoshop.  You can also emboss, drop shadow…whatever you want.  I don’t know if I will give up font fun, but will experiment with signature presentations as it does seem a more personal display.

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Green Heron intently looks for fish in the water below.

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My first acceptable squirrel picture. Have fought their 
nervous quickness with shadowy light 
unsuccessfully a time or two.

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Baby Gator already looking a lot like mini Mom or Dad!

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Purple Gallinule in tree branches with colorful green 
and yellow foliage.

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Well, that is the Wacom signature attempt. Did a green overlay on it
 to show up on my dark WordPress background.

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~ by Judy on February 6, 2016.