Life is Precious 

Life is Precious -- which is why I wanted the viewer to focus on the colorful words that make up life. In order to do this, I turned washed out the colors in the photo using the Kuler app so they would still be the same with a higher level of gray, or tone included in the image. Then I made the light from the window much brighter to create a "whit canvas" for my colorful words. Afterwords, I removed the outlining of each letter to allow the reader's mind to fill in the spaces.

I used Kuler to get the dark, monochromatic color scheme from the original, harmonious photo. I played with the shades and tones in Kuler to darken it, and then used a pallet from a painting found online at the MOA (this month's Normal Rockwell exhibit inspired my search) to get some of the bright colors in the LIFE image, using hexadecimal numbers to get the exact colors. 
The message I am sending is that when someone dies, they miss out on some of the basic elements of living--such as religion, friends, sweets, love, childhood, etc. Which is also why I chose to show a mother and a baby. The mother would never want to miss out on an opportunity to raise her child, and the baby has an entire life to live--he needs a mother.