I created a canvas by playing with all the gizmos on BeFunky and PicMonkey, then overlaid a photo I took today of purple pea-like flowers in my neighbour’s garden. And here’s the result: Nature Spirits at Play. It felt light-hearted as if the spirit energies of the purple bush had come alive and were flitting around.
Co-incidentally, as I was getting material together for this post, I came across the “Be a Weed” photo which I think is appropriate for this post!
I’ve been meaning to have a wander around the paddock next to our apartment for a while as it’s looking really lovely in spring – bright yellow carpet of flowers, grasses waving in the breeze, and in the distance we can see a tree with white blossom but have no idea what it is. North Cyprus is what I call a wildish place because it’s not kept in order, plants grow any where in any way and there’s a sort of chaos in the way areas of green space grow.
There are very few neatly manicured areas, more like chaotic disorganisation which is quite charming in its own way. I know it drives some ex-pats mad but I quite like the laissez-faire attitude towards vacant areas.
I didn’t wander far because the field is really overgrown and there are all sorts of obstacles in the undergrowth, not very conducive to long rambles, particularly with my dodgy back. The paddock is also full of “camel plant” which my husband said was so named because it was too spiky for even camels to eat, they gave it a wide berth when he lived in Cyprus as a kid in the post-war period.
So here are a few photos of this wild little area, complete with my companion on my foraging expdition: Jezebel, our first rescue pet, who is usually very stately but who had a grand time hopping and skpping among the overgrown plants.
I came across a photo I took of a bottlebrush bush when we lived at Bowraville on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. I took this photo before we had torrential rain which weighed the bottle brush down so far that it snapped the main trunk. I was really cheesed off, not only because I really loved that bottlebrush but because on the way down it snapped in half a small tree which I’d been admiring because it had struggled to grow and had finally taken off. Luckily both plants came good and survived! My husband, by the way, has quite different tastes to me in art – he likes landscapes, portraits and still life, etc. So yesterday, when I was working on this image, he wandered in, peered over my shoulder and said quietly: “Ah, yes, another plant sacrificed on the altar of digital art!” But don’t worry – you should hear what I say about his hobby of model railways!
I had fun creating this image as I started off with a pale green canvas in PicMonkey, then added a layer of the photo of bamboo I used recently in another piece of digital art. I was playing with various effects and then got the feeling of the energy surrounding a crop circle coming into being – the magic of the electrical energy and the ethereal beings surrounding the process – or on this occasion it’s the bamboo grove growing in the hotel adjacent to our apartment block – a bit prosaic, actually! But hey, imagination makes the world go round – or does it loop around on four square corners????
I’ve been taking photos of the various stages of opening in the pale pink rose that my husband brought home for me the other day. I’ve also enjoyed fiddling with Photoshop to create different colours in flowers. This is what I created with a violet version of the rose and various tweakings with PicMonkey and BeFunky: Violet Divinity. It reminds me that our connect with the Divine is never broken, it is around us wherever we look – within people, creatures, the earth. We simply need to keep our inner vision open to the majesty and beauty around us, very often in disguise.
My husband went exploring the neighbour this afternoon – mainly stooging around in our rural area. To my delight he brought home for me a lovely pale pink, almost fully blown rose. It’s a little bit tatty but I touched it up on Photoshop, deepened the colour, then brought it up in BeFunky and ended up producing this image, which I’ve called: Butterfly Lights. Don’t ask me quite how I ended up with this image as I just kept poking at the gizmo buttons until I got a piece of digital art I really liked. I am in fact using this as a basis for creating various canvases so that I have some base patterns available in future for creating digital art. 
This is a slightly different version of “Spirit of Bamboo” as I really can’t decide which I like best, so I decided to post both!
