My dh has been resistant to all things social networking. But, I finally got him to join Facebook. So last night he asked me to make him a profile photo badge too. It has all the things he loves in it…God, Country, Family, Guns, Technology, Body Building, and Rich the Ace Franklin!

I used photos I’d taken on our drive to Angel Fire at Christmas. After blasting the saturation I applied a pencil sketch filter and then used a gradated mask to blend them together. Most of the elements are on layers blended with “Pin Light” selected. It was fun doing this “digital collage.”

Since the design is a little eclectic and most of you don’t know my dear husband I should probably explain. He works at Verizon on the telecom switches that make your landlines work. There is a photo of one of these in the upper left. His favorite activities are shooting at targets out in the woods with his brother (policeman) and dad (pastor and Vietnam Vet), lifting weights, and watching UFC. His favorite fighter is Rich Franklin who has an amazing love of God and sportsmanship. Plus he was a school teacher who followed his passion and is now a millionaire, what’s not to love about that?

I think it was a great “Facebook Warming Gift.”  It even has a flag in it to celebrate the Fourth and now he is the coolest new kid on the block!

Credits:

• 3 Photos trees, cross, dh: Me
• Hearts: New Life Dreams
• Wings (on top heart in honor of our son in Heaven): Kasia Designs
• 1’s and 0’s: Obsidian Dawn
• Bling: Holly Designs
• Flag, Telecom Switch, Gun, Rich Franklin Logo, and Weights are all product shots off the Internet.
• Tin Frame: Katie Pertiet

Posted: July 4th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

I decided to celebrating the people I love who are serving the wonderful USA with a little gift….a unique photo profile for Facebook.

This first one is for my BIL Eric, who is a police detective.  The photo was taken at my in-laws in the woods where my dh likes to shoot at targets with my BIL and FIL (Army Veteran.) I love the mix of Army green grunge and splash of patriotic glitter. It has a little bling, but it still very manly!

Credits:
Photos (BIL & enhanced clouds): Me
Photoshop Brushes: Obsidian Dawn
Olive Stars/Brad/Alpha1: Christina Renee
Olive Splatter: CShep
Star Cluster: Kasia Designs
Red Butterfly Cluster/Paper Bit: Jofia Devoe
Tin Frame: Katie Pertiet
Star Pin: PKnox
Alpha 2: New Life Dreams

This next one is for my Cousin Dave who is a career Navy man. He is celebrating the fourth in Singapore with his lovely wife Dawn, gotta love it! He may have preferred a more manly design too, but I couldn’t help giving it a fun ocean theme. I told him it could be his wife’s badge if it was too girly!

Credits:
I made the frame w/ a brush from Obsidian Dawn and an Atomic Cupcake action.
Paper: Cathy Ann
Wreath/Sailboat/Wheel: Bisontine
Bow/flowers/Pollen/Water: Jofia Devoe
Flowers/Gemdrops/Lantern: Holly Designs
Tag: SuzyQ Scraps
Font: MKDesigns
Microferk: Word Art
Alpha2: Christina Renee
Staple: AHeimann
Water2: NLD

Posted: June 25th, 2009 under digital, scrapbook layouts.
Comments: none

I’ve got “digi” on the brain and so naturally I turned to my computer stash to make my husband’s Father’s Day card. I am hoping to get my fingers a little dirty with some paints and distress inks soon though!

He really liked all three cards we made him. I may just have to photograph the other two as well! Danielle kind out-did me on bolstering Neal’s ego, she wrote that she liked his “musls” (translate muscles) and lifting “wayts” (weights) with him.

My husband is a man of many talents, and I wanted him to know that I appreciate everything he does for us girls and our house!

Product Credits:

Castle/grass/ladder/frame/orange wood heart/stacked boxes-New Life Dreams (NLD), heart 1/heart2/heart3-On designs, paper-Holly Designs, stitching-Christina Renee, tiny heart-MK Designs, alpha1-JBullock, alpha2 Tracy Ann (TADA)

Posted: June 21st, 2009 under cards, digital.
Comments: 12

Danielle just finished her first year of dance. She loved being on stage but doesn’t want to do it anymore because she tired of the weekly classes. She is in love with the idea of doing cheerleading. Well, she certainly has the personality for it as is obvious in these photos. She came up with all the poses herself. She is signed up for cheerleading for next year and is very excited about camp this summer. I’ll miss dance and her teachers Miss Patty and Miss Becky. It is such a nice family friendly atmosphere at Miss Patty’s in Sapulpa, I’d highly recommend her to anyone.

This layout was also inspired by Tracy Ann’s paper which I got in a duo pack at 50% off. I decided to play off of the blue sky and color of the cattails. Danielle sitting in the swing was my first “extraction” in a layout. I used the “quick selection” tool and I have to say it worked really great.

By the way, I’ll share a tip I learned in a forum a while back. I tried it with these layouts and it worked like a charm. Keeping track of products used is very tedious, but necessary if you are going to blog your work. I’ve been putting off blogging because I’ve been so busy trying to start my Scrap for Hire business and didn’t want to go back through and figure out whose products I used. So, this time I left the art I used open until I was done and then went to “File Info” in Photoshop to record it all when I was happy with my layout. After I blogged Raeleigh’s layout I realized a really great added benefit….when I uploaded the photo the product names came with the photo into WordPress and I just copied and pasted them into the post!

Product Credits:

Paper-Tracy Ann’s Digital Art (TADA), Ribbon-Holly Designs, Cloud1-Bisontine, Cloud2-New Life Dreams (NLD), Cloud3-NLD, Cattails-NLD, Swoosh-NLD, Angel-NLD, Butterfly-NLD, Frame-Christina Renee, Alpha1-TADA

Posted: June 20th, 2009 under digital, scrapbook layouts.
Comments: 1

Here is a fun layout of Raeleigh. The photo was taken on a warm day this past January. I shared it on the blog that week, but here it is again in a digital scrapbook layout.

I was inspired to work on it when I bought the paper on sale at Tracy Ann’s store. She is having a really great $1 sale because she is trying to clear old stuff off her server. Since I have not been focused on “digital” scrapbooking long I really benefit from these sales because it is all “new” to me!

I had Raeleigh’s page almost done and was looking through Bridge in slideshow mode for some bling to finish it off. She was sitting in my lap and saw the star balls and asked me to put them on there. I’d have to say for a three year old she has great taste!

Product Credits:

Heart-New Life Designs (NLD), Paper-Tracy Ann’s Digital Art (TADA), Bling-Jofia Designs, Ribbon-Kasia Designs, swirl-TADA, bird-NLD, birdhouse-Lotta Designs, both hanging stars-Bisontine, blue heart-Kasia Designs

Posted: June 19th, 2009 under digital, scrapbook layouts.
Comments: 1

In case any of my potential clients have been visiting my blog this past couple of weeks I must apologize for the spam on the video and songs pages. I was getting hit with a spam comment every few minutes and my blog administration tools would freeze up every time I tried to do something about it. I finally finished deleting the bombardment of about 2,000 spam comments.

And for the sake of some quality content in this post here is a great article I ran across today:
http://www.scrapbookgraphics.com/wordpress/?p=819

It goes over a few ways to re-color elements. First, you can adjust the hue and saturation but if that does not give you the results you hope for try one of the techniques in the article:
1) Use a clipped adjustment layer to make hue and saturation adjustments.
2) Try the color replacement brush.
3) Try the selective color tool, but the author warns that this takes some getting used to.

Posted: June 15th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

This is a slide, for my latest video template, is a picture (from the local newspaper) of our family touring Holland in the early ’70’s. I used the bird graphic from Tracy Ann’s Graphics because there are other photos of me from that day standing among pigeons looking at the miniature city exhibit.

Journal strips are something I have not purchased yet because they seem too easy to make.  The other night I needed some and didn’t want to pay $14 to buy the ones I sourced with “Scrap For Hire” licensing. I polled a message board in search of someone else’s product with cheaper professional fees. But, I didn’t get a reply in time so I made my own.

First I painted my strips with an oblong brush set at 180 pixels. I set the brush up to have a hard edge and checked “shape dynamics” so it would start small and get bigger as I pressed harder. Next I clipped a plain aged looking paper to the brush strokes. I merged the layers and then applied Atomic Cupcake’s Pristine Chipboard action. WaLa, cute journal strips with a photo wrap layered on top! This mock up was done after the fact to show the stages. With this technique the shapes will differ because you are freehand “painting” the shape which is why my final chipboard strips are shaped differently.

Just for fun I did one more quick sample with tonight’s strokes and the “sketch and paint” action from Atomic Cupcake.

Later I went back to my ISO post (In Search Of) and there were some great options that were less than the $14 option I sourced. The hand doodled ones are especially cute, and I think the ones with the text paths might be a time saver? I’ll probably add some of these to my wish-list:

• http://www.sweetshoppedesigns.com/sweetshoppe/product.php?productid=18288&cat=0&page=2
• http://www.elementalscraps.com/shoppe/product.php?productid=19913&cat=0&page=1
• http://www.oscraps.com/shop/product.php?productid=22414&cat=0&page=5
• http://www.sweetshoppedesigns.com/sweetshoppe/product.php?productid=18406&cat=0&page=1

Products Used In The Layout:

Artists include Christina Renee (frame, flower, paper), Tracy Ann (bird and paper overlay), Bisontine (paper), Lotta Designs (greenery), New Life Dreams (greenery), Katie Pertiet (ribbon) and Atomic Cupcake for creating the journal strip.

Posted: May 29th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

Robin and James asked me to upload some photos for Facebook but it keeps erroring out. I’ll try again a little later, but for now I’ll put some photos on my blog and put the link on Facebook. This is my little nephew Micah Edward Todd. His middle name is after my dad, pictured below. Micah is the first Todd boy born in almost forty years. Since my dad was an only child, Micah’s dad James was a pretty big deal when he was the first boy born after three girls! Here are a few pictures from this morning.

Posted: May 25th, 2009 under photography.
Comments: none

Just in case any of my readers are wondering what in the world an action is I thought I’d do a quick post today showing a “before” and “after” layout with actions in use.

Photoshop’s help menu describes actions like this: “An action is a series of tasks that you play back on a single file or a batch of files—menu commands, palette options, tool actions, and so on. For example, you can create an action that changes the size of an image, applies a filter to the image for a particular effect, and then saves the file in the desired format.”

So, what Atomic Cupcake has done is created a store dedicated to selling actions to scrapbookers. There are a lot of digital designers that use Atomic Cupcake actions to help create the products they sell to you.

Here is a layout I created for the 4th video template which is still a work in progress. It is a photo of my dad taken in Hawaii at a Luau in the early ’70’s. I used Atomic Cupcake’s “Frosted Glass” action on the frame and flourish. And, I used “Pencil Sketch” on the frame and the flower. Since this is meant to be a masculine slide I wanted to downplay the floral aspect so I also used Photoshop’s “overlay” blending mode on the flower. He is in Hawaii though with flowers on his head after all, so I figure this works.

This is what the layout looked like before I started applying Atomic Cupcake actions. What I love is that you can take existing elements that you already own and make them look totally different. The actions added dimension and interest, all with one click of the button….literally.

Products Used

• Flower and : Jofia Devoe
• Paper: Franziska Altman
• Flourish: Christina Renee
• Frame: Banner Woman
• Beach Chair: Bisontine
• Cloudy Breeze: Kasia Designs
• Sand: MFisher

Posted: May 20th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

A couple of weeks ago I finally broke down and bought some actions from Atomic Cupcake. There are actions available all over the internet and the choices were overwhelming, but Atomic Cupcake consistently gets mentioned so I decided to start there. I have made some of my own actions, and would not go action crazy for things I could replicate with a little trial and error. But, the actions I bought from AC are full of so many steps that many of them take a minute or two to run. They are very complex and you just have to weigh the cost of your time in trying to acheive that look versus investing a few dollars in AC.

What I have found after a few days of playing is that some actions do exactly what I want on the first try, I’ll share a couple here. Others have results that might look a little fake. As someone who is relatively new to digital scrapbooking I’ve noticed there is a lot of “fake” looking product out there. But, if you combine actions with the right paper textures and elements you will get completely different results. So, don’t be afraid to experiement and don’t expect to get something you are happy with on the first try.

Yesterday my daughter danced at a local arts festival and I created a few scrapbook pages with pictures from the event. The two main actions used here are “Pencil Sketch” and “Glitter Edge.”  The inspiration for the layout is Danielle’s costume plus the art deco architecture of downtown Tulsa.  I had so much fun making these pages I stayed up too late and am finishing them up today when I should be getting some work done. But after I post it I’m off to Best Buy to look for an external hard drive because I have quickly filled up my 220 GB hard drive with scrapbook supplies and my computer is whining at me!

I am kind of in a hurry, and won’t list all the supplies out, if you are curious about a product just ask and I’ll look it up. But, the cityscape border is from Christina Renee, the flowers are from Jofia, the photo negative frame is by Katie Pertiet, and the the masks are from Tracy Ann’s graphics.

Posted: May 18th, 2009 under digital, scrapbook layouts.
Comments: 1