Saying "God Be with You" to Jolanda

Sadly, Jolanda of Jellebelleke's Designs is closing her shop. Her family has moved into a new home & she has taken a full-time job, so her designing days have been put on hold. I have enjoyed my time spent on her Creative Team & will miss creating layouts with her templates & kits. She was with Gotta Pixel for only a few months -- that's where I first became acquainted with her work. Right now kits & templates at her store in Gotta Pixel are on sale.
Here's my latest layout using one of the templates due to come out next month -- I don't know what's going to happen as these were supposed to be a part of the Gotta Pixel specials for June and are not in the store yet -- but I was really happy with the way this turned out:

So I bid farewell to Jolanda & pray that her new walk in life's travels will bring her happiness & fulfillment.

Progressive Challenge at Wilma4Ever

I'm working on a progressive challenge at Wilma4Ever.
Here's the first week's instructions:
Step 1:
Select a photo that you can stretch across your background. You will be using a single image as your background, so it needs to be stretched to cover your whole page. It could be a photo of a scene, a close-up of your garden flowers, a portrait, whatever. Keep in mind that we will be adding things over it in the next three steps, so there should be some white space or parts of the photo that you can artistically cover once it is re-sized to cover your page. After you have selected and stretched your photo over your page, add some texture to it. There are many ways to do this.
And this is what I did:
I made a copy of my photo after I stretched it to fit the page. Then I aded a a canvas texture to that layer. I added a second copy of my photo on top of that and aded a watercolor filter with the opacity lowered the opacity to 48%. Next I added a mask to the filtered layers and brought out the Great Blue Heron from the origional photos.
And it looks like this:

Step 2:
Create an arrangement out of some type of greenery (vines, leaves, pine boughs, etc.) AND some combination of long paper strips, straight ribbons, cord, beaded string and/or ric-rac.
 I would suggest that you design this strip either horizontally or vertically on your LO and that it should be no wider than 3 or 4 inches and at least 9 inches long. It can be narrower and longer than this, but I wouldn't make it very wide or very short. Think about layering this thing up -- stack things on top of each other, angle items just slightly so that some are a bit askew, mix paper strip patterns, different textures and patterns of ribbon, choose items of varying widths, etc. Have fun!

And here's what I did for the second step:

 

I picked up step 3 today --
TASK 3:
Select a photo and frame. You will position this photo and the frame on or under the strip you created last week. Let's really make the photo pop by using an action or an overlay or a blending mode, etc.
Now I'm off to do this task & will post the LO when I'm done.

Here it is -- I picked my photo & used an action by Dave Jaseck that created a mask & frame for the photo all in one action.

 

One more step to go & then I'll have a completed LO!

 

 

TASK 4:
 Title/Journaling
 Make a title out of at least two words. Use a handwritten font for at least one word and a chipboard alpha (or something similar) for at least one word.
Add some journaling, even if its just the date.

 

And here is my final project: