He Hung the Clouds

So, Tracy's technique challenge for this month is digital painting. I have been meaning to do some layouts with the many nature and sky shots that I take, so I pulled up one of the sky and found a good Bible verse and got started.

Originally, I was going to make a background paper using the digital painting and then decided that the sky was too pretty to try to figure out how I could complement it in that way. In fact, this is WHY I take so many pictures of the sky and flowers. I am reminded when I see them that what God has made is so much more glorious than anything we have "created".

On to the technique: for the frame lines, I used the "stroke path with brush" so that I could keep the lines straight. Sometimes my hand is steady enough to do a decently straight line (good tip for this: zoom way out on your image so that the straight line that you draw doesn't have to be a very movement of your mouse). But, last night, I wasn't, so I used the path instead. The question mark is freehand and I used color variations to acheive the mottled look as well as applying a layer blending style to it (I think it's a color burn, but I'm not sure).

Click here to see the layout in the gallery (and see what others are doing with the challenge).