Ella German

My submission for this week’s contest:

I wanted to show a little girl tempting her high-fashion Barbie with cookies to fatten her up.  I’m now wondering if I should have made the girl more chunky for a cleaner read.  Still,  I had lots of fun making up the image.

Big showing this week!  I’m still sorting out my favorites from the gallery.  Many great Runner-Up images.  The fig leaf one by Klaas Verplancke (RU#1) is a riot and Roman Muradov’s (RU#3) is such an inventive beauty.

The beach — too much sun and icky things in the sand.  That’s what came to my mind when I thought of kids and the beach!  I tried to express some of that over-protective Mommy in me in this image.

Footwear, sunscreen, and sunhat — it’s all sensible enough to me, but the kids could care less.  As a joke, I wrote 100 SPF on the sunscreen, not realizing that they actually make it!

The beach is certainly inspiring.  So many beautiful images this week, it’s hard to pick a favorite.  Check out the gallery here.

I attempted an urban family scene, but…

“Yech!”  That’s what I thought when I looked at my submitted image the morning after.  Too crowded, too many proportional problems…it’s an awful feeling when you’re ashamed of your own work.  But I found that when I covered the central figures with my hand, it was much more appealing.

I played with what I had and photoshopped a more simple image, which allows a cleaner read of the relationship between the sunflower and the sparkler.

I always associate sunflowers with summer, and they’ve been on my mind as I daily sprinkle water on our containers of sunflower seedlings (the darn critters eat every one if I start them in the ground).  And I’ve always admired plants growing on fire escapes.  Now I wish there were more plants in this image.  Maybe a pot of tomatoes and some herbs?

Anyway, I like the idea of a sunflower reaching to face the sparkler as much as he does the sun.

The cool gallery of images is here, winners are posted separate.  See the flag motif in the pretty image by Gilbert Ford (#26)?

The winning image by Jin Suk is awesome.  Powerful, no?  Many lovely runner-ups.  Really like the humor in Gabriel Guma’s RU #4 and the texture in Brigit Schössow’s image.  Go see!

Here were my 2 entries for this week’s contest.  I didn’t crack the runners-up list, but I enjoyed myself nevertheless.

I played with the Facebook friends logo with this one.

..and with the multitude of choices one is forced to make when planning a wedding.  Here’s my solution to pleasing just about everyone – at least when it comes to cake.

Just pretend that the couple looks more like Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife.  It was rather a last-minute thought to turn my generic couple into THE Facebook couple.  I realize Françoise Mouly prefers no text in her cover images, but I thought the writing made a lovely cake decoration.  The numbers come from actual Facebook pages.  Seriously, over 5 million people have liked chocolate cake!