[Blacknight]

How about some seasonal art? Something that FEELS like Christmas, without being exactly traditional. A thought...

[pstewart]

I found this image of Xmas lights on freefoto.com:

http://www.freefoto.com/christmas/noel_1/index.asp?i=53

They have a nice selection of other Xmas photos as well...plenty to work with for this challenge if you haven't scanned in any of your own Xmas pics. I obviously haven't.

I did one version for each quality of Xmas lights: heat and light. To get the wide black lines for this first one I used dust'n'scratches filter on the top layer of the blur/dodge outline method, and used linear dodge instead of color dodge.

Phyllis

[pstewart]

Here I used a layer blurred with radial blur plus a layer where the dark areas only were blurred with gaussian blur and allowed to draw some color from the lights to give them a wide soft glowing outline. Merged, duped, set top layer to color dodge and lowered opacity. A few levels adjustments in there somewhere as well.

Phyllis

[pstewart]

And it wouldn't be Xmas without this, now would it? Got the pic from freefoto.com. Click below to download it:

http://www.freeFoto.com/christmas/noel_1/index.asp?i=27

Supposed to look like a painting on wood. Used cutout filter overlaid with blur-dodge layer outline method, then overlaid an embossed texture from Andromeda Techtures to get the wood effect.

Phyllis

[Blacknight]

Another feeling.

[Blacknight]

More feelings.