Challenge #6  In your own space, create something.

Challenge #8   In your own space, celebrate a personal win from the past year.

For a number of years now, I've been tweaking background tiles to create new ones. Most of them came from the now-defunct GRSites.com; and I used their software for some of the modifications, along with Microsoft Picture Manager. For the past several months, the graphics I've been working with have been based on one called (on that site) beige208.jpg. This is the original graphic:



I've made many variations, some of which have already been used on my website. At first, as with "Fairies of the Orchard", it was more a question of intensifying and slightly colour-shifting the original. Then, as in "Back in the Saddle" and "Professional Courtesies", it was a matter of applying filters. More recently, though, I've managed to get the graphic to shift in more malleable ways. For example, the graphic I used on "Grand Old School, Second to None" (written last Yuletide), involved the use of a filter to both darken the band across the graphic and augment the background colour.

Here is a selection of others, some made last year and some just this past month. If you click on the graphic, you can see how it tiles: