The Inside Front Cover

This is the completed inside cover.

It is composed of two images, a tree and some paint splodges.

See what I mean about keeping the bad pictures? This is the tree at the bottom of my garden. It is a pear tree, and as I write, it is covered with delicious pears. I took this picture to help me plan how to prune it; I needed to cut off any branches that are growing straight up, while leaving branches that are growing sideways. It is very difficult to see what you are doing when you are standing under a tree looking straight up at the sky in the low light levels available in an English winter, and this job has to be done in winter: it helps to have a plan. In its own context, it is a perfectly good picture. It shows the branches clearly. It won't win competitions, but that is not what it is for.

The green and red fringes that make this a particularly bad picture start to be really interesting when combined with another image. This is the other image:

I have already indicated that I did cheat a little with the paint effects. I had already scanned in and experimented with some test pieces, so I knew what colours and effects I wanted.

Then it was a matter of selecting the parts of the images to use, lining them up, and applying the filter.

The pink paint goes in the bottom layer.
The top layer contains the tree picture with a 100% Difference filter applied
Which results in this: the inside cover picture.

Here's a shot of Paint Shop Pro's Layer palette:

The reds and pinks turn green and blue, and the copper goes a spiky blue. The hard edges where the paint spread out turn bright green, giving the impression that there is back-lighting. As for the trees, by cutting out a section without buildings, we get a row of small trees, and the coloured fringes in the original give them the curious embossed look.