Gold Star – Marlene

This month, our Gold Star shares her story from the Southern hemisphere. That shows how our community is really all around the world, and everyone can and do enjoy creative project using Paintshop Pro. I can tell you that Marlene has been a loooong time member of the Campus.

Can you tell us a bit about you?

Hi, my name is Marlene Lingham. I was born in June 1949 in a place called Swanscombe, in the county of Kent, England. I am the youngest of three girls: Marion, who is 11 years older than me; and Mary, who is 2 years older. On Christmas Day 1964, when I was 15½, my parents invited a couple of friends to our place for the evening: Bert, his second wife Lilian, and Bert’s 19 year old son Russell. Two days later Russell wrote to ask me out and the rest, as they say, is history – we have just celebrated our 47th Wedding Anniversary. We haven’t got children but I do have 3 nieces and a nephew and five great nephews and two great nieces.
A couple of years before we got married we started to talk about emigrating to Australia, much to the dismay of both our parents, and in October 1971 we finally arrived in Adelaide after a four week cruise on the Sitmar Line ship The Fairstar, part of an emigration scheme that made us £10 Poms! We had no jobs, very little money, nowhere to live and one name and address of a couple to contact - this was a big test of our relationship but we survived and probably got stronger. In 1984 we moved from Adelaide to Mount Gambier in South Australia’s Limestone Coast, a beautiful spot with a very famous Blue Lake.
I have worked in various places, a bank, a factory that made cement mixers, washing machines and cars (a strange combination!), a medical laboratory and two different High Schools. My last job before I retired was as Finance Officer in a High School, where I worked for 23 years, however my greatest pleasure during this time was being the Producer for 16 school Musicals. I learnt to use computers in the 1970’s, when mainframes took up whole floors and programs were loaded on punched cards, and found I had an affinity with software such as Excel, Word and particularly Publisher.
I learnt to play golf in my late 30s and both Russell and I became involved with the local Golf Club, on Committees and so on. We also enjoy going to other courses to play, just the two of us, and this has become one of our favourite things to do on holiday. We bought a 4wd in 1990 and for the next 8 or 9 years had lots of trips into the Australian Outback with a couple who ran Tag-A-Long Tours. We saw lots of wonderful places and made many friends. Since we retired in 2008 we have been back to England for a visit and have now bought a caravan, joining the many Grey Nomads who travel around this great country of ours. We haven’t taken the plunge to travel full-time yet but that could happen in the future.

How did you get to work with PSP?

I started working with Paint Shop when it was Jasc, version 6 I think and I got it as a freebie. I have updated over the years and am now using X9. I find the program very easy to use and of course the fact that it is a lot cheaper than Photoshop is an added bonus. I am not a photographer, other than holiday snapshots and so on, so I don’t use the photo editing features as much as a professional would, but I do make adjustments where necessary. I like the way later versions of PSP are giving more options for scrapbooking users, such as the templates. I have a number of plugins apart from the KPT collection that came with the program and I enjoy trying out the various effects. Unfortunately there are so many of them I don’t use them as much as I could.
My sister Marion was trained as an Occupational Therapist so is very arty crafty, and she makes cards in the traditional scrapbooking way. When I visited her in 2005 she suggested I make a card for my niece’s 40th birthday, so I followed her instructions: cut this out; paste this here; peel off this border; type this text and so on, all the time thinking “Cut and paste, that can be done on the computer!” On my return home I investigated digital scrapbooking and was blown away by the number of sites and the amount of materials available. I now use PSP to make my own personalized cards, collages, flyers and posters and so on. I love being able to include photos with the cards, particularly for special occasions or, sadly, sympathy or get well cards. It has become an expectation among my golfing lady friends that a “0” birthday (60, 70 etc) will be celebrated with an A4 framed collage and a special card.

How did you get to join the Campus?

I can’t remember how I found Scrapbook Campus, possibly from just looking for tutorials on the internet as I really enjoy learning how to do things on PSP. I subscribed to the Creative Scrap classes, than added the Master Classes and now I am a Diamond Member. I am not at all artistic, can’t draw to save my life, but I am rapt when I can use a feathered selection and change of lightness/darkness to make a piece of ribbon look 3D! Cassel is so good at explaining things, everything seems very simple and straightforward and I find I can create wonderful things very easily. I also enjoy using Cassel’s scripts and have promised myself that one day I will buy the Scripting Course, however I will need a lot of spare time to devote to that.
The Forum is a great place to share ideas, ask questions and just get to know the other members. I also enjoy participating in the Master Classes online, the only problem being time differences especially during our summer when the presentations start at 6.30 am!

Can you share some projects you created?

Christmas 2011. I have a friend who spends a lot of time at Christmas putting up lights all over their house. I followed Cassel’s instructions in the “Details in the Night” Masterclass to create this Christmas card of our house and the lights – needless to say the photo was taken in daylight and the lights added later.

My first birthday collage for a friend’s 60th. We had been to the Open together and I had taken photos of some of the players.

A friend’s Mother had passed away and left some money to the two grandchildren. Erin wanted to give them something special with the money rather than just an envelope. This is a great example of the advantage of layers in PSP, being able to put the photo of Molly on her 80th birthday behind the deb dress.

My Brother-In-Law’s 80th Birthday card. I had found a tutorial on how to make a Cameo from a photo and as this photo seemed appropriate I had a go - very pleased with the result. The photo was of Keith at his youngest daughter’s wedding, when he was obviously much younger than 80!

Where can we find you?

I post occasionally to the Campus Pinterest page and also to the Forum. I don’t have a website, blog or gallery.
Thank you Cassel for the chance to share my story. I love reading about our members and I also enjoy spreading the word about Paint Shop Pro: I have recommended it to a couple of friends; they have bought the program and just need to work out how to use it. I have suggested they join the Campus but I don’t know if they will.