Dedication to Grandma Karlene

 So my grandparents on my dad's side are now starting to leave this world. My grandma has been suffering with Alzheimer's disease for a long while now. We saw signs of it back in 2013, and it's just been slowly taking it's toll as time has gone by. We live pretty close to them, so we've gone to visit my grandparents many times while my grandma was suffering the disease. 2020 was rough since there was a period that we were not able to go visit them due to the pandemic, and when we felt it was safe to visit them, she was bedridden. Early in 2021 she was put on hospice, so that was hard, but what was sadder still is that I felt that my grandma has been gone for a while.

It was especially hard since I was very close to my grandma. She'd come for me and my sibling's birthdays, important events such as graduations and church events, and even come for Christmas and some Thanksgivings. While she didn't stay for very long (average about 3 days), she was there, and interested in knowing who we are and what our interests were. She always sent a card for all major holidays that matched our personalities growing up, and was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. I could ask her a question about almost anything, and she would know the answer! She could remember everyone's birthday without writing it down, all while being a biology teacher at a high school. I'm sure she impacted more lives than mine, but I have felt her passing very hard. So here, in light of Alzheimer's disease and raising some awareness, I give you her dedication artwork, with a lot of forget-me-not flowers.

I started by drawing a very crude pedal, refining it more with each layer. I then duplicated the layer four more times, and organized it into a circular pattern, and made the opening wider. I then adjusted the spacing and added the middle of the flower which has the pollen. I added some noise in the middle for texture, and blurred the pedals and the yellow, then I added a white gradient coming from the middle and placed it on the pedals, duplicating it, and blending them with Overlay and Lighten. I then flattened the image, and pretty much copied it and duplicated it a lot. I then adjusted the size, and rotated it to make a bunch of flowers that looked slightly different. I then added a black gradient to the smaller flowers, the smaller the flower, the darker the gradient.

I then moved on to the background. I made a gradient background of blue and green, did some radial blur effects, and blended them together with Negation. I then flattened the entire image, copied it, un-flattened it, and pasted the flattened image on it's own layer. Then, I did a polar inversion, and some radial blur effects, using Overlay to make two similar backgrounds able to blend together. I then used layer blend mode Lighten to see a bit of the original gradient background that I manipulated. I then added the text on top and on the bottom, as well as my grandma's name to the pedal of the big center flower using Overlay and Color Dodge to blend it and bringing the opacity down.

Hopefully you enjoyed this image. I hope my grandma would like it too since she seemed to like flowers. She would always send my mom flowers for mother's day, which is why I decided to make this image with a bunch of flowers. I also chose forget-me-nots, since that is the flower for Alzheimer's and Dementia. I will never forget you grandma, and you will always be in my mind until we meet again.