― Carol Lynn Pearson
Happiness is like those palaces in fairy tales whose gates are guarded by dragons: we must fight in order to conquer it.
― Alexandre Dumas
The first image was taken at Ward's Island Beach in the summer of 2011. The Toronto Islands beaches are among the cleanest in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) despite their proximity to the downtown core. We took a tent with us that day, a good thing since we experienced one of the biggest thunderstorms of the season that afternoon! Despite strong wind gusts and lashing rain, our tent held firm and we stayed dry and cozy for the hour or so that the weather raged over us. My daughter was pretty unfazed during the whole episode, and thought it was a pretty cool to have snacks and work on jigsaw puzzles with rain drumming on the roof of the tent. The dog, however, was not that impressed! :) I took the shot of the lake about half an hour after the storm had passed and the cruise ship was making its rounds again. I waded out to the water until I was about thigh-deep to try and get a nearer shot of the boat (I only had my 35mm camera lens with me that day) but that was about the best close-up shot I could get.
The second picture was post-processed in Photoshop CS4, using textures from Shadowhouse, Flypaper, and Florabella. I "stamped" the dragon onto the composition using a Photoshop brush I had made of a vintage illustration in a 1906 book entitled "Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art". If you would like to download the brush for personal use only, you can click on this link.
(This post was originally published in July 2011.) © FieldandGarden.com. All rights reserved.