Well it’s been since April that I last shared a fine art piece with all of you from my The Journey series… and honestly it’s because I haven’t been creating any. With the new addition to our family and trying to hustle my bustle to get back to work as much as I can while still taking care of my, my husband, and our home – the fine art series kind of got pushed to the back burner. (Which I know is totally fine! We’re definitely enjoying our time with Marlee as we know it’s already going by so fast!) And honestly, we had an adoption hurdle to cross before we were comfortable or able to start sharing some things with you. But now that we’ve crossed that obstacle, I thought we’d start with this…

It occurred to me when Marlee was exactly 24 days old that I had the unique opportunity to create the “final” piece for The Journey series. You see this series was created with the idea of capturing the feelings, emotions, and ideas the I felt and experienced while traversing our road of infertility and adoption. How blessed we are that our current journey has ended with a happy ending in our beautiful daughter. So my super supportive husband let me heat up our house, set up my handpainted backdrop (available at BoxDrops by SJP), and worked with me to capture this image (and a few others).

Obviously this should be a happy image! Our journey ended joyously! So I wanted to be sure to use warm, cheery tones and the backdrop and my dress helped allow this to go a long way. With the pose, I also wanted to show the love I have for this precious baby girl I get to hold and love and call my own. And I wanted to make sure we were the focal point of the image. Because I wasn’t really needing anything crazy – no real composite work was required. Just some fun adjustment layers, textures, and playing in photoshop were all that was needed for this piece!

As always – I put together a timelapse video of it’s creation here:

And here’s the final piece

I hope this was a fun one for you all to see – it certainly was wonderful to be able to create the “final” piece for this series. And I say “final” because I had a list of other ideas written down that I didn’t get to complete. I still plan to do those at some point in the future, but I wanted to be sure we got this image while Marlee was still tiny. If you have any ideas or suggestions for future projects, I’d love to hear about them. Or if you want to be a part of a fine art project – just shoot me a message!