"Butterflies"

Newer postcard: Saturday 2009 04 25

Original postcard: Friday 2009 04 24

This week’s Sunday Postcard Art challenge was “Butterflies.” What a wonderful theme! My earlier post is below. I decided to experiment some more with GIMP, because I originally wanted to create a more imaginative postcard than the one I had to settle on due to the learning curve with the new tool. So I have two this week. The background for the newer one is from a poster that I modified significantly. The butterflies are also altered. I used GIMP as well as the tools I’ve been using in the past to create it. Additional information is in my original post…

2009 04 24: I was only able to create a very simple postcard this time, because this week was a new beginning for me. Thanks to Mary, I’m now using GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program, which makes the whole process much simpler for me. (My “pixel” problems should be a thing of the past now.) The tool is very powerful, and it’s free! :-) But I just started using it Sunday April 19, so I have a learning curve, and I had some frustrating moments until I figured out how to make it “do” what the help was saying it could “do” but which it wasn’t. :-(

I decided to make an “Illuminated Manuscript” book page with butterflies as part of the pictures on the page. I started with an Illuminated Manuscript book page (writing only, no pictures) as the background. Then I added butterflies and flowers from artwork by E. A. Seguy. (I modified some of the flowers slightly.)

All of the images are from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Technical notes to myself (I didn’t think I’d have these this time): For some reason, the final postcard, reduced to 4x6 in GIMP then exported as a jpg, had some picture quality problems when I printed it. I then noticed that although Paint said it was 4x6, it was smaller than my other postcards that also say they are 4x6 in Paint. So I took the original sized GIMP jpg export, opened it in Paint, copied it, pasted it as a new image in PhotoPlus, and reduced it to a 4x6. I created a 4x6 image, copy/pasted the 4x6 image into it as a new layer, filled the background to get it to be a true 4x6, then exported that as a jpg. That image result does not appear to have the picture quality problems like the GIMP one did. I repeated that experiment with GIMP, but the final result had the same problem as the original one. So this requires further investigation.