Original Image (Before Digital Manipulation) © Ed Sandoval

How It Was Done!

A special thank you to Ms. Shira Destinee Jones — for her beautiful words, and permission to use them. Shira is an academic, advocate, community organizer, educator, inspirational-ist — and actively volunteers in her community. You can visit Shira here!

I did a Google search for “kindness,” and then “compassion”… and then got lost down an image rabbit hole (jumping through “similar images” suggestions) and found this piece. There were no attributes attached; so I did a reverse image search, and found the artist: Ed Sandoval. I believe the original piece is entitled “Light into Valdez.”

I opened the image in Photoshop Express and applied a “Haze” filter. I then manipulated a blur effect (this feature can be found under the tuning menu) — centered on the people, with a maximum outer radius. I saved the image; and moved on to Canva.

I chose to keep the image in its original aspect ratio (1008 x 805) and went through Canva’s “edit image” menu. I added a “raindrops” element, changing the transparency to 30. I then downloaded that image (because the element had to be enlarged off-image, in order to cover it).

I went back through Canva’s create menu (again, maintaining the original aspect ratio), and added a rectangle-element, with custom color options. I used a separate hex-color-match tool, and tuned the element to match the “basalt grey” (#575463) at its outer border.

After that, I moved the element off-image and changed its transparency setting to 90.

For the quotation itself, I used the “Oregano” 39-point font, and changed the line spacing (apologies, I failed to note what I changed it to). I added an additional body-text element for the citation, keeping the “Oregano” font-style — adjusting it to 24-point font.