week 37: Early haloween

Yes I know its not been a week since the last one, but I figured I've missed out on enough weeks that I can "make one up" while I've got a photo I want to share.

This was my entry for a photo-manipulation weekly "contest" on flickr. Its the first time I've entered, though not the first one I've started doing, but I managed to complete this entry before time run out (I made it by about 4 hours!) Still I was very pleasantly surprised to be awarded the winner of the week which means I got to choose the starting photo for the next week's contest.

I had a lot of fun with it. Just for comparison sake, here's the original photo I started from

 So as you can see I had to make several changes, but I used much less photos than I did in the previous photo manipulation that I put on my blog. Just the pumpkin, the moon and a brush for the bats. For those of you who don't know programs like photoshop or gimp, a brush is an image that you can use over and over - it comes from the round brushes you get in all such programs to start with, think of ms paint's pencil tool where you could choose how thick a line you draw. Esentially all you're doing is drawing one dot after another and so brushes specially modified images that you can drag around, or as I did if you click only once you get a single instance of the image. Offcourse you can use any colour with your brush, but I figured black would be best for bats.

So sure its too early for haloween, but I think the making of this picture will replace this year's pumpkin carving attempt.