Photographs & Postcards – Throwback Thursday/Teaberry Gum & Photo Tweaking

couple-with-gum

Does anyone remember the flavor of Teaberry Gum?

“Clark’s Teaberry is a brand of chewing gum which the D. L. Clark Company of Pittsburgh’s north side purchased the patent from Charles Burke, who experimented with various flavors of chewing gum in the basement of 533 McClintock Ave, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Teaberry is currently marketed by Clark Gum Company in Buffalo, New York, and made in Mexico. The gum dates to 1900” ~ Wikipedia

I haven’t seen Teaberry Gum in any large grocers or box stores for many years, but it is still sold in my local Amish Market dry goods store. The flavor is distinctive and so is the aroma.

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I searched in vain for a copyright free photograph of someone blowing a bubble. I finally resorted to two favorite sites I use for photo tweaking: Adobe Photoshop (Paint, a free computer application also works well for cutting away backgrounds) and the free photo editing site PicMonkey. Most of the applications on PicMonkey are free. The image I used was a postcard stamped with a 1920 postmark.

I cut away the background in Adobe, and used PicMonkey to add the transparent pink bubble.

For those of you who are not sure about images you can use for your blog, look up public domain image laws. I can rest assured that I can use this postcard because it was created and sent before 1920, and the copy I use for my art is owned by me.

“A great source of true public domain images that are available to you are old books and postcards. Look inside the book at the publishing details, if the date of publishing is before 1923, you can legally scan or photograph these images and use at your leisure. The same applies to old photographs and postcards, if the original pre-dates 1923, you can use the image for your purposes without permission or payment.” ~Ebay

Photographs & Postcards – Try Tweaking!

angel-baby

I’ve shared my love of vintage postcards in past posts…today I want to share a bit of photograph-tweaking using an old postcard. This beautiful postcard features a Victorian angel in feathers on the front. The postmark of 1911 is still visible on the back of the card. Postcards of this age are copyright free and available to use in artwork and designs.

I usually don’t use an image in a stand alone fashion when I use copyright free art. So, I tweaked the original through Adobe Photoshop and one of my very favorite sites, PicMonkey.

angel-baby-squared-fleuriful

I treasure my little cherub, and even better, printing her/him out does not take a lot of printer ink. I am going to use this image for some gift tags and possibly in the future for baby shower gift cards. I enjoy the thought that this artist’s work lives long past the 100+ years ago it was created. Maybe our combined efforts in this altered version will live for 100 more. Thanks for looking!

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