But every morning, dark or light, cold or warm, I’m now up at 5:30 am… rousting Oscar as I go off for my 1/2 hour drive to Schenectady, where I work as a graphic designer. After over a decade in a brightly sunlit, plant rich environment with rainbow making prisms in the sunny windows where I can make my own hours and life, I spend my days in a small, gray, dark cubicle.  Some days, the sun is down when I get back home. It has not been easy – regular paycheck aside – but by far the hardest part has been leaving my little pussycat behind me every day.

So, to make the transition easier, I dug through a series of photos I’d taken back when Oscar was featured as a “home office cat” in well known home business magazine article, and created an 11×17 photo poster that I could hang behind my computer monitor in the cubicle. It will never take the place of having the big puffalump snoozing in my lap while I work all day, but it will remind me why I work hard all day to bring home the catnip.

After I got past the initial puzzle of how the drummer was staying upright without a tow rope, in a day and age where Photoshop was non existent, I started by cleaning up some minor degradation and spotting. Then I adjusted the contrast in places that were dark but still needed color, like the flag’s stripes. The client provided some input into the colors to use, and I chose others that seemed appropriate. After a number of revisions, the new version looked like it had been tinted the way it was done by hand in the old days of photography – using Photoshop. This is the final result:

The party theme was to be a birthday ball for a princess. I sent my client to iStockphoto to choose the perfect castle background scene, and got my instructions on what other elements I might include, and the wording to go on to the card. The final invitation will printed as the cover of a booklet, and I also provided this image without the words in 5×7 and 8×10 sizes so Aria’s mom could have it printed and framed.

And here is the final invitation. I removed her from the existing background, placed her into this castle scene and added the embellishments like flower crown, lilies, butterfly and sparkles. My client loved it even more than she expected she would, which always makes me happy!

The castle photo was purchased as stock photography, and then I worked on removing him from the original photo. Some minor correction, and into the new scene he went.

Once he was in the castle scene, I had to re-size him so he’d seem proportionally correct to the castle door. I cropped the entire image so that the castle tower would seem to be a much bigger building off camera. Some more correction was needed so the lighting would be right. Then I added a shadow to make it realistic.

After that, I applied painting styles to the entire image so that the end result would look like it was made up of brush strokes. I delivered it to the wife as a gift she could frame and give.