In creating layouts for the Gourds of Christmas book, I had a wonderful opportunity to practice my digital art and photo manipulation skills and techniques. The author of the book, Sandy Uhrick pretty much gave me free reign and let me do whatever I wanted.
For one of the layouts, I decided to put a gourd inside of a snow globe. I watched some video tutorials and created a globe in GIMP, using a variety of techniques. Here are some before and after photos.
The first photo was taken at the Hive Art Gallery (in Decatur, Indiana). The second image is what the snow woman looked like in the digitally created snow globe. We decided that the gourd looked better in the first photo.
Sandy suggested using another snow woman that she had created- this one had a red shawl and a hat with birds sitting on it. I was concerned that much of the detail would be lost but I decided to try it and was pleasantly surprised- it turned out well.
Here is the finished book layout. The watercolor clipart was purchased on Etsy.