Posts Tagged ‘Atomic Cupcake’

I bought a bunch of cluster frame sets at Designer Digitals this week while they were having a store-wide sale. I just went with a personal license for now because most of my S4H work uses only one picture per layout. I’m hoping that they will allow me to speed scrap! But, maybe not because these layouts didn’t take me any less time! I need to find a good action for shadows with warping options because I’m now hooked on doing it that way but it takes too long!

Anyway, Danielle completed her first Cheer Camp this week and she is having a blast! My favorite pictures are actually from the first day of camp, so I’ll be doing one more page to go with this set.

There really are not any techniques to share on this layout except for the warping. But, I’m really still figuring out the angles on that and my shadows are all over the place. So, the only word of advice I’ll offer is to first “load selection” on the item you want to warp so that the grid will be on just that item instead of the whole page. Most of the time I just fiddle with pulling the corners all down in the same direction. but, when you are dealing with fun elements like the swirls or the thread here you can really have fun pulling at all the middle anchor points too.

I am pleased with how this turned out, except for maybe the title. I think it could be better. I hope to use the frame clusters to scrap 2009 in real time and quickly move through my pictures from 2007 because I made Tabblo pages that year and all my photo editing/journaling is done. Hopefully the 13 packs of photo clusters I bought will do the trick.

CREDITS LEFT SIDE:

Paper 1&2, Swirl, Journal Bubble: TADA
Paper 3, Stitches, & Flower: Designs by Laura
Frame Cluster: Katie Pertiet (with additional warping and shadow to match right page.)
Stars: MK Designs
Leaves: Holly Designs
Burnt edges: Atomic Cupcake

CREDITS RIGHT SIDE:

Papers, journal box, swirls: TADA
Flower 1: New Life Dreams
Flower 2: Holly Designs
Flower 3: Diamante
Stars: MK Designs
String swirl: Designs by Laura
Mask: New Life Dreams
Photo Frame: Katie Pertiet

This was the first year we really let the girls participate in fireworks. Danielle loved the sparklers, but kept getting too close to my bare legs! And Raeleigh went through 1/2 the boxes of Pop-Its that I bought to be shared between six kids!

I’m actually very behind on scrapbooking but think I’ll try and get 2009 current with digital scrapbooking and work backwards from there. I was inspired to work quickly on this layout by the freebies on the Scrappity-doo-dah blog. I was a little disappointed though that there were only a few designers that are Scrap for Hire friendly.

My favorite discovery with this layout is that the Atomic Cupcake tear action works very well for large items. I’d previously tried it on some smaller elements and did not think it was realistic enough.

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.

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