This was a goodbye gift to our wonderful friends who moved to Washington, D.C., last weekend. We miss them already, and my eyes welled up this morning when I read my friend’s Facebook update quoting her not-quite-3-year-old daughter saying, “When are we going to Concord New Hampshire?”
I wanted to make them something that would remind them of Concord, so my first thought was a picture of the Statehouse, where our boys often played together on the lawn after shopping at the nearby farmer’s market. I took a picture of the Statehouse and then downloaded a picture of my friends from their Picassa web gallery and combined the two in Photoshop.
I could have stopped there, but wanted to give the image a more artsy look, so I used a tutorial I found in a Photoshop book to turn the image into a pen-and-ink sketch/watercolor. That process was rather lengthy, though I saved most of the steps in an action so I can use it quickly in the future on other photos.
I plan on writing up a tutorial on how I put it all together, but basically I printed multiple copies of the image, cut out several layers and stuck them on top of each other using double-sided foam tape.
Miss you Jess, Peter, Jasper and Josie!