Tag Archives: cali4beach

Valentine Friends are Forever, … Aren’t They??

“Friends Forever, … or just for Life?” by iamtalkytina, on Flickr

I was so happy when I read that my good and dear friend Alan (@cogdog)was encouraging us all to share our Valentine love! The ds106 “Valentine’s Day Caption Challenge.” by SaraK (cali4beach) is just wonderful! I am so looking forward to receiving your Valentine’s Day greetings!

I found this special picture in cali4beach‘s Flickr set (as per the assignment directions), and then searched high and low for hours, looking for just the right fonts. By searching using the terms “free fonts romantic” I was finally able to settle on two — Blessed Day font (by Billy Argel, for personal use only) and Precious (by Bolt Cutter Design , commercial-use friendly), both shared on fontspace.com. Aren’t they nice fonts? They are very friendly, and oh-so-romantic, too. Just wonderful for my special friends!!

After importing the image into Photoshop, and working to fit my title “Friends Forever” into the upper left corner, I decided I needed some extra space, and so I increased the Canvas Size (upwards and to the left, by clicking the cell in the lower right corner to fix the original image there) to gain a bit more space for a slightly larger font size and some white space for wiggle room. To fill in the left and top margins, I used primarily the Clone Stamp tool, with a bit of the Healing Brush tool, to fill and smoothen. I also gave both the girl and the boy some nice hair extensions — can you tell? I especially like the stylish skunk-streak the girl has coming out of her forehead. .

Once the background was fixed, I moved the text around, added a whole slew of fx settings to the text (bevel, emboss, inner glow, outer glow, drop shadow — the works), just to get my special fonts looking so wonderful. I stuck with pink and red — the colour of Valentine’s Day — as the primary choices. I think red has something to do with blood, and how hot it runs? Isn’t that true?

Once done, I exported my image as a 1200 pixel wide jpg — nice for looking at online — uploaded it to my new Flickr account, and then embedded a 640 pixel wide image here on my blog. I also tagged it with the proper tags, ds106, VisualAssignments, VisualAssignments931, and the assignment title, “Valentines Day Caption Challenge.” I also tagged cali4beach, Alan Levine, @cogdog, Friends Forever, card, Valentines Day, and, as always, Friends.

I hope you all like it! Happy Valentine’s Day. I will be watching my inbox and twitter account for signs of your own shared love for me.