"From Chaos, Currents Of Love, Came Dancing"
Collaborative Artwork by Gary Lange, Rob Work, and Barbara Leyendecker

"From Chaos, Currents Of Love, Came Dancing," was done mostly in Corel PhotoPaint. Later in it's development, I brought it into Adobe PhotoShop and played around with the edge and some 3d effects. Sometimes enough is enough and adding more to a design only boggles the mind. One of the Adobe filters I put this image through was Filters/Distort/Diffuse Glow. I didn't notice at the time how it lost definition to some of the angled radial lines, or I would have immediatly undone or reduced the effect. So I junked that idea and created the award below. This is why it is always good to save your files often. Make sure when you have something you like, you can go back to it! If you know you can fail, you're more likely to take playful but daring chances with an image. Get out on the edge and create something new!

I've gone into the first image above, added more canvas, (Image/Canvas Size,) and created an award for my niece. I'm recognizing her for another year of achievement in school, and just because she is special to my heart. In this case, although the original image was created with Corel PhotoPaint, I added the extra canvas around the image, created the textured background, and did the lettering in Adobe PhotoShop. I made sure the text layer I wanted was selected in the layer palette and then I used a few effects on the lettering, like drop shadow and bevel and emboss, (In the Photoshop menu bar click on layer/effects/drop shadow and then layer/effects/bevel and emboss.) You are given various options for color, depth and style in each options box. Play around with these options to become experienced and fluid. I then rendered the text, (layer/ type/ render text,) and did the rainbow effect on the top lettering. Rendering the text makes the text an object, similar to creating a square or a triangle. You can then select the text and play around with image qualities like contrast or go into the filters menu and apply any filter. It is important to realize that there are different things Photoshop, or other graphic software, allow you to do with text and objects! You can't edit text once you have converted it to an object. If you suddenly notice a word is speled wrong, say missing an l, you can't go in to the word and add that little l, you have to start over with the whole word or phrase. Spelling is not by best subject, so this is where I get caught a lot.