"Birthday Greetings" – Postcard

© All Rights Reserved

This week’s Artful Times challenge #14 was "Postcard with some alphabet letters and/or script."

I created this using GIMP 2.8.2. All of the images are from an Internet search. I made the outer gold ball border using one ball from the inner border image. I added a layer mask to the script to fade the portion that covered the inner images. I chose complementary colors for the inner background and outer background colors.

The words are from the book The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe.

The fonts are Jane Austen and Worn Manuscript.


Then, smiling mournfully and pointing upwards, his lips moved, but, instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior being.  The strain seemed to swell louder, and she awoke.  The vision was gone, but music yet came to her ear in strains such as angels might breathe.  She doubted, listened, raised herself in the bed, and again listened.  It was music, and not an illusion of her imagination.  After a solemn steady harmony, it paused; then rose again, in mournful sweetness, and then died, in a cadence, that seemed to bear away the listening soul to heaven.  She instantly remembered the music of the preceding night, with the strange circumstances, related by La Voisin, and the affecting conversation it had led to, concerning the state of departed spirits.  All that St. Aubert had said, on that subject, now pressed upon her heart, and overwhelmed it.  What a change in a few hours!  He, who then could only conjecture, was now made acquainted with truth; was himself become one of the departed!  As she listened, she was chilled with superstitious awe, her tears stopped; and she rose, and went to the window.  All without was obscured in shade; but Emily, turning her eyes from the massy darkness of the woods, whose waving outline appeared on the horizon, saw, on the left, that effulgent planet, which the old man had pointed out, setting over the woods.  She remembered what he had said concerning it, and, the music now coming at intervals on the air, she unclosed the casement to listen to the strains, that soon gradually sunk to a greater distance, and tried to discover whence they came.  The obscurity prevented her from distinguishing any object on the green platform below; and the sounds became fainter and fainter, till they softened into silence.  She listened, but they returned no more.  Soon after, she observed the planet trembling between the fringed tops of the woods, and, in the next moment, sink behind them.