Lavender's Blue, Dilly Dilly

My grandmother used to sing me that song, "Lavender's Blue," and  I awoke with it in my head this morning. It might be because I spent so much time playing with this old photograph in Photoshop last night.

My neighbour was going to throw out a collection of old photos a couple of years ago and I seized the opportunity to grab them for my hoard.  Recently, she requested them back for a project of her own, which prompted me to actually do something with the pictures before relinquishing them.

Many hours of scanning later, this young pair sitting on the grass caught my attention.  

Are they brother and sister?  

Cousins?  

Good friends? 

 Sweet hearts?  

The boy in particular looks so romantically, yet innocently, charming.

(Of course, we'll never know...but look how discreetly the girl's knees are tucked beneath the boy's bent legs...secretly touching.  For this reason, I'm including this picture in Bonnie's themed gallery this month, "Embrace" over at Pixel Dust Photo Art.)

 I zoomed in on them, scanned them and set to work in Photoshop, experimenting with tools I'd not tried before, such as the airbrush.  The result, I think, lends an impressionistic feeling to the picture: not quite photograph, far from painting...yet something in between.  

Here's the original photograph ( approx. 4 x 2 inches).

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"Lavender's blue, dilly dilly,
Lavender's green.
If I were queen, dilly dilly,
you'd be my king"...
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Meanwhile, it's back to bed for me--the scanning bed!