View of a Harbour – Caspar David Friedrich Card | Zazzle #Sold!

View of a Harbour – Caspar David Friedrich Card created by FirstNightVintage.

Source: View of a Harbour – Caspar David Friedrich Card | Zazzle

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“The Lookout” Framed Prints by Sarah Vernon | Redbubble

Sight update: I’m seeing the ophthalmologist at 9:30 am this morning!

Features / British Artists 30 March 2015 / The Group-Gallery of Art & Photography 13 March 2015 / Photoshop / Photograph by Fré Sonneveld at Unsplash / Textures from 2 Lil’ Owls /

DOVER BEACH — MATTHEW ARNOLD [1822-1888]

The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair / Upon the straits; on the French coast the light / Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, / Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. / Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! / Only, from the long line of spray / Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, / Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in. / Sophocles long ago / Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought / Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / Of human misery; we / Find also in the sound a thought, / Hearing it by this distant northern sea. / The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, / Retreating, to the breath / Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world. / Ah, love, let us be true / To one another! for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night. • Also buy this artwork on wall prints, apparel, kids clothes, and more.

Source: “The Lookout” Framed Prints by Sarah Vernon | Redbubble

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First Night Design | The Lookout #Art #Repost

FROM THE ARCHIVE 14th March 2014

Photograph by Fré Sonneveld from Unsplash. Textures 2 Lil’ Owls.

Dover Beach — Matthew Arnold [1822-1888]

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the Fr…

Source: First Night Design | The Lookout | First Night Design

First Night Design | Sailing to the Moon #Art #Repost

FROM THE ARCHIVE 25th July 2015

When I reblog my posts, I try to leave a decent gap and hope to catch more recent followers who have not seen a piece before or to garner a new audience for a very old post when hardly anyone was following. Sailing to the Moon received a huge amount of likes and comments. I haven’t checked the statistics but I suspect it’s one of the most popular posts on First Night Design — very pleasing. I’m re-blogging it because I love it and I have nothing else to show!

‘What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all th…

Source: First Night Design | Sailing to the Moon #Art | First Night Design

First Night Design | Turning Windmill #Art

Buy Turning Windmill @ Sarah Vernon at Saatchi Art

Inspired by the work of J M W Turner, I created Turning Windmill (yes, the part-pun is intentional!) by using one of my textures, one from Kerstin Frank and a photograph of a windmill in Estonia from Wikimedia.

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‘Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.’
George Orwell, Animal Farm

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Buy Turning Windmill Tile © Sarah Vernon at Zazzle

When I first posted about Turning Windmill in January 2014, I was not at all sure about it and had yet to upload the image to any of my galleries. But those of you who were following my blog at the time were enthusiastic and I went ahead and put it up for sale. I’ve become very fond of the image and am rather glad I left it as it is.

Buy Turning Windmill Service Tray © Sarah Vernon at Zazzle

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“This little piggy saved some water,
This little piggy biked for sun,
This little piggy used windmills,
This little piggy used sun,
And this little piggy squealed
‘Re-re-recycle!’
All the way home.”
― Jan Peck and David Davis illustrated by Carin Berger

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Take care and keep laughing!

 

Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | The Eel Fisher’s Hut #Abstract #Art

The Eel Fisher’s Hut © Sarah Vernon @ Redbubble

Abstract created in Photoshop with a couple of textures from 2 Lil’ Owls and a photochrom colour print from Wikimedia of an eel fisher’s hut on the Bore (Bure River) England, between 1890 and 1900.

It’s something a little different from my usual work. It was adding the textures from 2 Lil’ Owls that completely changed my original idea — yes, I had one in mind for once. I added one texture in Normal mode and overlaid it with another in Colour Burn before setting the original photograph to Soft Light. The resulting fire damage effect was far too appealing to me to let it go.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Homecoming Pirate #Art

 

Homecoming Pirate Laptop Skin from Redbubble © Sarah Vernon

Using a personal photograph, I have added some of my textures along with one from Kerstin Frank.

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“The man is not wholly evil – he has a Thesaurus in his cabin.” (Captain Hook as described by J. M. Barrie in Peter Pan)”
― J.M. Barrie

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Homecoming Pirate Women’s T-Shirt at Redbubble © Sarah Vernon

Homecoming Pirate Framed Print from Fine Art America © Sarah Vernon

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“One could mention many lovable traits in Smee. For instance, after killing, it was his spectacles he wiped instead of his weapon.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

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Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Margate Translated #Art

Welcome to Margate … translated.

Buy Margate Translated © Sarah Vernon at Crated

Margate in Kent, a popular seaside resort since the 18th century, is possibly best known these days as the town where artist Tracy Emin grew up. But did you know that it was home to J.M.W. Turner?

“Where therefore, and in this very town of Margate, [Turner] lived, when he chose to be quit of London, and yet not to travel” John Ruskin

Although I wasn’t thinking of Turner when I discovered this photograph of Margate and its harbour dated 1897 (Wikimedia), I might have been ‘channelling’ him!

“Mrs Booth”, sculpture by Ann Carrington, Stone Pier, Margate [Wikimedia]

The Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate writes that ‘Turner’s connection with Margate was the founding inspiration for our organisation. He loved Margate for the sea, the skies, and his landlady Mrs Booth.’ Don’t you just love it that he was potty about his landlady!

Visit Thanet gives some interesting snippets about Margate:

• In the 1700s, bathing in the sea and drinking seawater became a fashionable cure for all sorts of diseases. From the Georgian period onwards visitors from London began flocking to resorts like Margate for the seawater cure and increasingly as a place to socialise. Margate has built a reputation as a place for bathing in the sea – both for health and pleasure.
• Margate has a special place in the history of the ‘Bathing Machine’ with Benjamin Beale inventing the modest hood in 1753. This canvas canopy could be lowered and raised by the driver of the machine, allowing bathers a modicum of privacy as well as some protection from wind and waves.
  

  A man opening the door of a woman’s bathing machine. [Wikimedia]

• Whilst in Margate recuperating from a nervous breakdown, TS Eliot sat at the Grade II listed shelter on Margate seafront and composed the key lines in his poem ’The Waste Land’ – “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing./The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/Nothing”.
• Margate, was the first place to offer and popularise donkey rides on the beach, starting back in the early 1800s.

So now you know!

Margate Translated Tote Bag from Fine Art America

Buy Margate Translated Cushion from Fine Art England

Available at the following galleries:
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Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Painting with Textures #DigitalArt

Buy Searching the Sands © Sarah Vernon At Fine Art England

As I’ve said before, there are various software applications by which you can turn a photograph into a digital painting. While they have their uses, I prefer to use textures to provide a more interesting and subtler creation than that created by algorithms (or however it’s done!).

I created Searching the Sands in Photoshop with a photograph by Chris Sardegna and a texture from 2 Lil’ Owls, I tweaked the colour balance, brightness and contrast in both images and enhanced or faded certain areas.

Chris Sardegna

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“I had a dream about you. We were running on the beach, holding hands. It was a nude beach, but we were the only ones wearing clothes. You wore a bikini, and I wore my dead grandma’s dress—with my grandma still in it.
”
― Jarod Kintz, I had a dream about you 2

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Buy Searching the Sands © Sarah Vernon at Crated

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They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.
—Edward Lear

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Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
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Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

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First Night Design | Drifting Downstream #Art

Buy framed print from Crated

Original photo by Scott Webb from Unsplash lovingly blended with a texture from Kerstin Frank to create a ‘painting’.

Buy Greeting Cards from Zazzle

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“Only the development of compassion and understanding for others can bring us the tranquility and happiness we all seek.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

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Buy the duvet from Fine Art America or Fine Art England

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“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. – Amir”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

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Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England
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Take care and keep laughing!

Tangle Mountain: Playing with Textures

ONE FROM THE ARCHIVE — OCTOBER 2013

Originally posted on First Night Design.

Tangle Mountain © First Night Design

“Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

So says Ratty to Mole in the first chapter of Kenneth Grahame’s classic tale, only to  crash straight into the river bank.  Ah, bliss.

I feel much the same when it comes to messing about with photographs and textures to create something unique. Sometimes I crash; sometimes something wonderful and unexpected happens.  Such was the case with Tangle Mountain.

I began with this intriguing photograph of a castle in Liechtenstein by Karpati Gabor downloaded from Morguefile. I was particularly struck by the seemingly painted effect of the land and castle. The latter looks as though it has come from a Tim Burton animation.

Often I will try countless photographs and textures before…

via Tangle Mountain: Playing with Textures.

First Night Design | Sailing to the Moon #Art

Sailing to the Moon © Sarah Vernon — Available on various products @ Fine Art America & Fine Art England

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‘What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.’
Thomas Merton

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The yacht photograph is by Zakhar Kleyman on Flickr, while the texture I have used in a ‘soft light’ blend (Photoshop) is by Kerstin Frank, also from Flickr. I’ve made it sound as if Flickr is a village!

Available at the following galleries:
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Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | The Windmill #Art

This is an extremely early piece when I was only just beginning to realise what textures could do for a photograph. The windmill, from Wikimedia, is on the Île de Noirmoutier, an island that lies off the coast of France, and I used a filter from Snap Art, one of my background textures, and one from Skeletal Mess.

Buy The Windmill © Sarah Vernon [Crated]

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Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly. Animal Farm by George Orwell

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The Windmill 3 Ring Binder

The Windmill Pack Of Standard Business Cards
The Windmill Postage

Available at the following galleries:
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First Night Design | “When a day that you happen to know…”

Birth of a Triffid © Sarah Vernon

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“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

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If my father had appeared in the film version of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1963), I could probably recount some interesting story about filming that has never before been published. But he didn’t. He did, however, have a part in the adaptation of Village of the Damned (1960). But I know nothing of his experience in that film!

Birth of a Triffid is my idea of how these monsters start life and bears no resemblance to any triffid living or dead. Just so’s you know.

Available at the following galleries:
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First Night Design | The Lookout

The Lookout © Sarah Vernon Buy at Crated

Photograph by Fré Sonneveld from Unsplash.
Textures 2 Lil’ Owls.

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Dover Beach — Matthew Arnold [1822-1888]

The sea is calm tonight. 

The tide is full, the moon lies fair 

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light 

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 

Only, from the long line of spray 

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, 

Listen! you hear the grating roar 

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 

At their return, up the high strand, 

Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 

The eternal note of sadness in. 

Sophocles long ago 

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought 

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 

Of human misery; we 

Find also in the sound a thought, 

Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 

 

The Sea of Faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 

But now I only hear 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 

Retreating, to the breath 

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world. 

 

Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Available at the following galleries:
Redbubble
Crated
Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America
Fine Art England

Take care and keep laughing!