A Photo A Day [221]

In my very humble opinion, I think I've been on fire lately coming up with great shots for this project. I'm really proud of what I've been churning out. Only problem is, setting up those shots and then editing them takes up a lot of my time. It's hard to juggle so many interests and this past week especially it's been tough to find the time to make dinner, read, work out, and keep up with my sewing projects since I've been spending so much time behind the camera and immersed in Photoshop. So today I'm going the lazy route and am posting a picture of a spindly tree I took a few days ago. I've done minimal processing, just a quick Photoshop action from a fun set of free actions I recently downloaded. The set's called "Ghost Stories" and with actions named "haunted," "nightmare," and "forbidden" how could I resist? Right up my horror movie-loving alley! If you like what you see you can download it here.

Alien Invasion Silhouette Plate

This was meant to be an easy way to make one of those ubiquitous silhouette plates with a fun Halloween twist. Turned out to be not quite so easy. Not only did it take forever to cut out every little detail of the silhouette but my Mod Podge skills aren't exactly up to snuff. If you don't look too closely you won't see the smears of paste around the edges of the image and you'll hardly notice the wrinkles in the silhouette. I guess that in addition to the alien invasion the poor boy also suffers from premature aging. One of these days I'll figure out how to properly use that stuff.

Still, I'm more or less happy with the result. I was doing a late-night Google search looking for inspiration when I stumbled across the awesome silhouette of a boy with an alien creature bursting out of his mouth. That plus a Dollar Store black plate was all I needed. Well, a little photo cropping and editing also helped followed by a lot of time spent carefully cutting the darn thing out.

This is the final homemade element my Halloween mantle has been missing. Now it's just a matter of arranging everything nicely, waiting for the right light, and chasing the cats away so I can get a decent picture of the finished product. Yes, I am drawing the suspense out as long as possible here. Hope the final reveal is worth it!