Christmas
Blessings
Images Modified For Christmas
E-cards
Created by K. R. Overholt Critchfield © 2004-2017
Published December 16, 2017

Christmas Blessings 2017;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2017
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Welcome to our Christmas Blessings
Web Page!
For many years now, it has been
my habit to create Christmas Blessings
e-cards that I have sent to members of my family,
friends and Internet friends, even to those who
get regular Christmas cards from me and my son,
Matthew. Every year, I search the Internet for a
picture that interests me, something that might
be turned into an expression of my deep and
abiding love for Christmas and the Christmas
story, but also could be acceptable to those who
celebrated other holy days.
After a few years of trial and
error, my choices gravitated toward artwork that
had no modern copyright problems, usually
paintings from a century or more ago, because the
pictures always seemed to look better with a
little modification here and there. My efforts
began when I barely knew how to manipulate the
details of photographs, first using a modest
(i.e., old) computer program called PhotoStudio,
and then using a Adobe Photoshop program
that is now outdated, but still useful. Most of
the time, both programs were used in tandem to
get the proper effect.
Christmas Blessings 2017 is
my best effort for this year, and I hope it will
be welcomed by all my visitors. I want to
continue this work for Karen's Branches,
because it is good to keep Christmas in our
hearts all year long.
Karen's Note
The picture above is a portion of
16th century Italian painter Pompeo Batoni's The
Sacred Family. No date was given for the
painting, but my research found Batoni was a
painter in Luca and Rome, whose work was with
paint and transparent watercolors, and he also
worked as a draughtsman. His work period was
circa 1793 to circa 1787. When you see a full
length version of this painting, you will see
that it is very nice, but somebody clipped a
tight shot of the Madonna and Child, and that is
the picture I saw first. After finding a picture
of the full length painting, it seemed to me that
the tight shot told the whole story of the love,
trust and interdependency of a mother and child.
That is where my heart was, so it became my
Christmas story for 2017.
My work with the photograph was
in modifying colors and textures. Special
attention was given to the skin tone of the
mother and child, adding a healthy glow. Once the
picture looked right, I tried several different
kinds of backgrounds and frames, but they usually
diminished the beautiful picture. In the end, I
created a frame from the border of a carpet, from
a picture found online, and it worked just fine.
Then I took the red color from the upper lip of
the child to finish the full effect.
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Christmas Blessings 2016;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2016
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Karen's Note
Above is my version of The
Light of the World (1749 or 1750), by French
painter François Boucher (1703-1770). In French,
it is called La lumière du Monde. As
shown, I found two different dates for Boucher's
original creation. It is a lovely expression of
the First Noel. The modifications were
in accenting the colors, lighting and the
background. Also, I brought the circle of people
out of the shadows and brightened up the cow. The
frame was inspired by the border of a carpet,
taken from a photograph found on the Internet. I
managed to match the colors and make the frame
look like a wood carving. It seemed to fit.
This picture was chosen for my
2016 e-card precisely because of the familial
gathering, which reminded me of several members
of my immediate family who recently passed away,
two of them died in 2016. For me, the figures in
the background represented my mother Rose, who
died in April 2010, my adoptive father Lee, who
died in February 2016, and my brother Duane, who
died in October 2016. Working on this photograph
was a blessing to me.
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Christmas Blessings 2015;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2015
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Karen's Note
In 2015, my inspiration came from
Innocence (1892), a painting by a
prolific French painter from La Rochelle, France,
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). This was
the second picture of a Bouguereau painting that
I used from his vast collection (see Christmas
Blessings 2013 below). In his lifetime, he
produced 822 known finished paintings, and many
of them can be found on the Internet. The photo
above is the top portion of a soft iconic
painting that features a Madonna and Child, plus
a baby lamb. Both the baby and the lamb are
beautiful. Depicting babies in paintings appears
to be a difficult task for most artists, but
here, Bouguereau has created something quite
lovely.
As an icon, this picture is
wholly an expression of the love and protection
of a mother for her precious child, but it also
includes a melancholy foreshadowing of the future
appellation for Jesus, The Lamb of God.
It seemed to me that the figures should look more
human, so my goal was to reduce some of the
otherworldliness of the original, and increase
the perception of reality. My work shows up in
the skin tones, the colors of the clothing and
the background, along with a few extra details to
the left and right. It took a long time to decide
on a surrounding frame, but a photo of a linen
panel with pastel stripes gave the best look.
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Christmas Blessings 2014;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2014
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Karen's Note
For this e-card, the center of
attention is The Madonna of the Rose, by
the Italian painter, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio
(1467-1516). Another source gives a different
title, Virgin And Child With A Flower Vase,
but no date was given. Also, his surname has
another spelling -- Beltraffio. When I decided to
work on this picture, I did not know that
Boltraffio was one of the "strongest
artistic personalities" to emerge from the
studio of Leonardo da Vinci, who happens to be
one of my all-time favorite artistic geniuses.
Recent research gave me that bit of news.
For me, this picture came alive
while manipulating the lights and darks, the skin
tones, and the flowers. Then a whole lot of time
was spent creating the frame from scratch, using
a photo of green fabric. Not yet mentioned is the
additional task of finding the proper font for an
e-card. Every picture needs a font that fits the
visual story, so I try all kinds of fonts, with
and without shadows, before picking the one that
looks the best. Because of the pattern in the
green frame, it was hard to find a font that both
suited the overall experience and stood out as a
message.
Back in 2014, when my sister saw
my finished product, she commented, "Of
course you would choose a picture that looks like
you and Matthew," which surprised me, but a
second glance proved she was right. The faces on
this High Renaissance painting looked a bit like
me and my son, Matthew, when I was younger and he
was a baby. That is, except for the red hair.
Certainly, the artist's depiction of the mother
holding onto her busy child reminded me how I had
to keep an eye on my own son, who was always on
the move, especially when he learned to walk.
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Christmas Blessings 2013;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2013
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Karen's Note
Regretably, this e-card was sent
out without identifiying the original painting or
the painter, and that was probably because I
could not locate any data back then. If my memory
serves, I found the full-length picture online
somewhere, and it did not include any details.
Maybe a year later, while looking for another
Christmas subject, I discovered the name of the
artist, along with pictures of a whole lot of his
other works. The 19th century French painter,
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), was the
creator of the original work, Song of the
Angels (1881), or The Virgin of the
Angels (1881).
In the original, Bouguereau
presented the angels as very real
three-dimensional figures, which must have been
astonishing to those who saw it for the first
time. Basically, I believe he was saying,
"Angels are real," and I appreciate
that viewpoint. My modification of the photograph
made the angels look ephemeral, because that is
my own philosophical point of view. I believe in
angels, but believe they are . . . well, other.
In my imagination, angels exist both inside and
outside our world of three dimensions,
simultaneously. This was my first time using the
special effects that are offered in the Adobe
Photoshop program. It took quite a lot of
experimentation to produce the effect that
appealed to me. I also worked on the colors, the
highlights and the shadows of the dozing mother
and sleeping child, and brought out the colors in
the background.
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Christmas Blessings 2012;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2012
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Karen's Note
At the time I was working on this
appropriately named Christmas Blessings
e-card, using a small photograph clipped from the
Internet, the name of the artist escaped me. All
I knew was that this was a lovely modern iconic
picture. Especially lovely was the depiction of
the baby, and I appreciated the subtle,
foreshadowing arcs of thorns. In religious terms,
the Madonna's red clothing and golden breastplate
remind us she is a highborn woman. Essentially,
she is a queen without a crown, and her baby is a
future king. To me, this was a political
statement, softly but truthfully spoken.
Because the picture was small, I
needed to search the Internet for a background
that would echo the designs used by the original
artist, and found something with a sky of stars
and hearts that seemed to fit. I spent a lot of
time melding the picture with the sparkling
background, especially at the top of Madonna's
halo, because the halo on the picture I was using
had been cut off. Three years later, I discovered
a web page that featured an even better
photograph than the one I had worked to modify,
and was pleased to see the Madonna had a full
halo.
More, I learned that this work of
art may have been the best known such painting
during the Victorian-Edwardian era, a lovely Madonna
and Child, painted by Marianne Stokes.
Additional research gave me her full name,
Marianne Preindlsberger Stokes (18551927).
She was an Austrian painter, who settled in
England when she married a landscape painter.
Stokes was one of the leading artists of Queen
Victoria's England. Madonna and Child
was one of three paintings she created on the
same subject, each one very different from the
other.
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Christmas Blessings 2011;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2011
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Karen's Note
At the center of this 2011 e-card
is a photo of the Nativity Window at St.
Peter's Episcopal Church, Brentwood, PA, where I
was a parishioner for many years, a member of the
choir for most of those years, and at the end,
the cantor. My son Matthew had taken photographs
of all the stained-glass windows at St. Peter's,
so I expected the Nativity Window to be
a fairly easy project. However, that window was
not photographed well, for the light behind it
had faded, late that afternoon. It was necessary
to spend a whole lot of time bringing out the
colors and the shadow details, because in these
windows, the shadows tell more of the story.
You will notice that some of the
shadows are cut off at the top of the photograph,
and that is because the windows are very tall.
The lower sections can be pulled open during the
spring and summer. Occasionally, it was my duty
to close all those open panels after a service.
For the e-card, I had to cleaned up the black
lines that are part of the overall stained-glass
structure, because the picture was taken at a
slight angle. The red background, as I recall,
came from a image that was downloadable on the
Internet.
That holiday season, I felt good
about my e-card, while sending it to my family
and friends at St. Peter's. Then, a few years
later, while I was singing in the Chancel Choir
at Trinity Cathedral, downtown Pittsburgh, a
Christmas card from St. Peter's showed up pinned
to a hallway bulletin board, and lo! The
folks at St. Peter's had created Christmas cards
using a professional-looking photograph of their
window. I was impressed.
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Christmas Blessings 2010;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2010
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Karen's Note
My 2010 e-card was prompted by my
Internet search for angels. My mother had passed
away in April 2010, so thoughts of heaven and
angels were often on my mind. Despite all the
angels I found in paintings, Nativity scenes and
ornaments, nothing seemed to appeal to me as an
e-card that was something definitive and
original. Finally, I turned to a little project I
put together for the children at St. Peter's
Episcopal Church, Brentwood, PA. It was an 8 1/2
x 11-inch page using angel designs created by
Rudolf Koch (1876-1934), whose work was on the
Internet. Designed for the Christmas season, the
page was intended to be handed out to children,
along with some crayons, so they could spend
their time coloring, during a couple long
Christmas services.
Rudolf Koch was mainly known in
Germany for his calligraphy and font styles, but
he also created line drawings for church uses.
For my part, I did some modest remodeling of his
stylized angels in order to fit everything on a
single page, but also made half-page versions of
each angel, so the children could choose which
individual or group of angels appealed to them
most on a cold winter's day. Then I realized my
design could also work as a Christmas e-card.
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Christmas Blessings 2009;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2009
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Karen's Note
When planning my first official
Christmas e-card, something to send around to
members of my family, friends, and Internet
friends, my inspiration came from Nativity
scenes, both paintings and three-dimensional
creche figures. I came across a picture of these
statuettes being sold on a web site, and believed
I could create something special. With this
picture, a pixel by pixel project took many days,
because once the perfect color was chosen for the
background, each figure had to be seamlessly
melded into that color. It never entered my mind
to make a note of the web page that offered this
set for sale, or the company that produced them.
I will keep looking for that data.
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Christmas Blessings 2004;
Image Modified & E-card Created by K. R.
Overholt Critchfield © 2004
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Karen's Note
When I was putting together the Christmas
Blessings web page, I remembered that my
first attempt at designing a Christmas e-card was
for Karen's Branches in 2004. It was
created for Christmas 2004, but then was
published late, in my InterOverholt Memo
of January 2005. A small picture found on the
Internet, plus a photo of a red velvet bookcover
came together for this e-card. The photo seemed
historically old enough to allow me to make some
modifications. Specifically, the fact that in the
original, the Madonna looked somewhat bald at the
top of her head bothered me, so I added some
hair. The modified picture included my visual
poem, One, which was arranged to look
like a candle. It was a case of putting two
thoughts into one, so to speak. I wanted the poem
to be shaped like a candle, because of a song's
refrain that I learned as a very young child:
"If everyone lit just one little candle,
what a bright world this would be!"
Recently, after hours of
searching the Internet, I discovered the artist
of the original work of art. Martin Schongauer
(1450-1491) created Madonna and Child in a
Rose Arbor (1473), a work of tempera on wood
(201 x 112 cm), at Saint-Martin, Colmar. The
painting is surrounded by an intricate wood
carving. It is also known as Madonna in the
Rose Garden (1472), and in Deutsch,
the title is Maria im Rosenhag (1473).
So there are three different titles and two
different dates. One web site showed a really
fine photograph of the actual three-dimensional
work, a much better photo than the small one I
found in 2004. My e-card version is a really poor
expression of the original. A photo given at
another web site was modified and too garish, and
the birthdate given for the artist was c.1445,
not 1450. Yet, another paragraph states,
"Schongauer was born in about 1440 in
Colmar, Alsace ...." He lived a long time
ago, but his paintings and engravings are still
treasured.
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