Several years ago, I had the privilege of creating an “art” book with one of my friends who is a gourd artist. This wasn’t just an ordinary book with text. No, it had images of her gourd art as well as other images. My goal was to make each layout a piece of art. For some of the pages, I cut out the gourd and added a totally new background. Other times, I simply edited the photo and added graphics. It was 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. It was challenging but also some of the most fun I had ever had. Gourds of Christmas book.
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. You can purchase the book here: Gourds of Christmas
