Calligraphy Flourish Friday - Greece

Yassas!

We returned last week from a wonderful trip to Greece. 

(I scheduled the past three Flourish Fridays to post automatically.)

Greece is a beautiful country - the people, the ancient sites, the sea - we enjoyed it all.

I took the above photo from the ferry on our way to Elafonisos, an island just off the coast of the Peloponnese.  I did the lettering with Moon Palace sumi and a Speedball C for the broad edge and a Hiro 700 for the script.  I tried to layer it in Photoshop Elements and change the lettering from black to white, but it's pretty rough.  

I'm trying not to be jealous of all you lucky souls that are packing up and heading to Orlando for IAMPETH.   I wish you safe travels and an amazing time.  I  hope you'll share your photos and experiences when you return.  I have enjoyed looking at all the pictures from my calligraphy friends on Facebook that were able to attend Odyssey in Boston.  It appears everyone had a terrific and creative conference.  We will be moving our son, Matt, up to university next week, so all you Orlando bound pointed pen folks will have to sling some ink for me!

I created a Greece album over at Flickr, and I'm slowly adding pictures to it.

If you'd like to take a peek, click here.

We had a great time, but it's good to be home!

Happy Flourish Friday!!

Designing My Blog's Header

I've been trying to design a header for my blog.  It has been two steps up and one step back, but you can see I haven't been completely unsuccessful. (Still can't figure out why the image is protruding beyond the border on the right.)  Thanks for helping me get that fixed!

I have had Photoshop Elements 4 for many years.  I thought I'd take to it like a duck to water, but unfortunately that hasn't been the case at all.  However, with the helpful posting of Trish Meyer to one of my calligraphy lists a few months back, I was finally able to tackle a task using PE4.  With black sumi, I hand lettered the word Flourish, along with the little floral and wheat elements, onto white paper.

Using the instructions I had saved from Trish's post,  I inverted the lettering from black to white.

Continuing with Trish's instructions, I combined my lettering with a background I had made in Victoria Pittman's Tortured Metals workshop.  

I added some text and wahlah!... my new header.  It was so gratifying to finally accomplish something in Photoshop Elements after all this time. Yay!..and "Thank you!" Trish.