I went scavenging at Pixabay.com for images to use on this blog this month, October, and quickly became bored with orange pumpkins, cutout silhouettes of cats, and depictions of ugly crone witches.
So I found some images that are not unique or totally original, but that have a truth of season in them.
Foggy field. With orange, but not smothering. I cropped.
A bench in golden light. It captures the lonely, sadness that visits so many people in the fall.
Cat eyes. Black cats get such a bad rap.
A room that just calls out for a seance.
Another dark foggy path through wooded land.
Too much orange sky but adding an alpha channel, and cutting most of the sky, makes the church silhouette all the more ominous.
Now please do not get me wrong, I loved making spooky Halloween cakes for my daughter’s class parties when she was little. And expected was good for seasonal Girl Scout crafts when I was a leader.
One of the plus sides of being done nesting, I do not like the word empty or the phrase empty nester, is that I can observe the seasons as I like. Art and photography for my blog is a great way to do it. And with high quality public domain images readily available at Pixabay.com I, and other bloggers, do not need to spend tons on images for sites that do not make much if any income, and neither do we have to settle for tacky or low resolution clip art to stay within the law. I am also uploading some images to the site for others to use. And the folks that run the site actually have found a few of my photos of high enough quality to accept for use on the site. I love cooperative, sharing economies.
Old Book Images
I love ’em. What can I say? It reminds me of pouring over printed pages and illustrations from old books that my parents stored away. They were textbooks and pulp novels from the late 19th Century through the early 20th. Even if I did not want to read the book cover to cover, I would scan each page looking at typography, although I didn’t know about the subject, I just loved the form of the letters. And old illustrations. I loved the compounding of message with the use of just the right image. That this could be done with just a few lines of ink amazed me. I loved being amazed.
This widget from Old Book Illustrations is my new favorite find, click on the image to go there.
So instead of an app of the week this is a widget of the week that will give you different images from the site for decoration on your site, if you are in search of such a thing. You can select among various sub-categories of images such as plants, people, buildings.
The site also offers some freebie graphic downloads with no strings attached and some fee for service offerings.
E is for Errant Equivocation
I was an errant equivocator today. Instead of writing I dilly dallied and delayed writing this post and other pieces while I contemplated moving this blog to triplebottomtimes.com (Don’t ask!) I even created a header for it.
But then as I usually do I quit doubting myself and the wonderful name I have here at reason creek. I just needed to make it look more bloggy and less corporate site-ish.
I used a couple images from the National Archives, one from sxc.hu and another from morguefiles.com, a few more images were from a recently rediscovered commercial set of clip art images that Hubby purchased for me a few years ago. Some of these I had to crop, add a border or remove a background, and in one case overlap a tiny image to make a long ribbon. Two were from a free digital scrapbook kit I downloaded when I was searching for backgrounds before I decided to just to it myself. I did some fill in with textures I had previously made from scratch or by just using my drawing program’s brushes as stamps.
Pretty good for a first attempt at a blog background don’t you think?