New Year, New Something About Love Blog Header, January 03, 2017 Gratiana Lovelace (Post #1025)

When the new year rolls around each January, I like to change my blog header.  And this year is no different.  I’m just surprised that I managed to get the new header up in the first week of the new year.  Ha!>

For the past couple of years, I have been enamored of an interior space clip art that I manipped (see below) and then changed out the  Richard Armitage character pictures each year:

The leafy green verdant mural with the palest of blue sky was very soothing–and reminiscent of a mural wallpaper that my mother had on our dining room in the house I grew up in.

But I felt that it was time for a change.  And the recent Jane Hotel Richard Armitage photo shoot for Broadway.com with the Fresh Faces: Richard Armitage video–portraits photographed by Emilio Madrid-Kuser–really wowed me!   So I really wanted to include one of those Richard Armitage portraits in my blog header.   Sighhhh!

Teeny tiny little problem.  The Richard Armitage portrait that I like best (below), is a vertical image, and this blog header is very horizontal.  Thanks to RA Bulgaria for creating the original portrait screencap and to Fernanda M for sharing it!

So although, I liked its background, there was nothing for it but for me to mask Richard’s portrait out of its background and put it into a new horizontally oriented background.

Now with having just Richard’s portrait, but no background, that presented another dilemma.  How do I seamlessly insert him into a background that is horizontal, brighter, has room for my blog titling, etc.?

So I used another image of the Jane Hotel (by Ian Ference) that I found online at Urban Daddy:

But it wasn’t wide enough either.  And that sparkly ball in the middle of the ceiling seemed too 1980’s disco to me–when the rest of  the lovely period decor harkened back to the 1930’s for me. So I cropped the image top down to the top of the fireplace, then cropped the image up from the bottom to the fireplace base.  Then when I sized the width up to the 940 pixels, et voila!  I had my horizontal image.

But the details on the zoomed in fireplace–plus the shadows surrounding it–didn’t show well.  So I covered over the fireplace with a similar mustard color to the walls (with some sampling) and I added my blog titling.  Ta da!

I might yet play around with my blog header this year, but here it is for now.  I hope that you enjoy it.

Cheers!   Grati  ;->