Leaderboard

Here is my page for the Tut /tech challenge. I create the page a week or so ago. I added, by creating the date banner, lifting some of the pennants, also I added a ribbon, and lifted one edge. I replaced the date stamp with the banner. Head on over to the facebook page, if you want to see a much less compressed layout, to see the details and colours in the photos. I rarely edit my photos. If I find there is a need to, all I tend to do is use the brightness and contrast, and crop tools. In this case the photos weren't edited. Also, for those that may be interested, birds are like dog, they don't perspire, instead they pant like dogs. For the past fortnight the temps have been in the high thirties, again today it is 37c, and hazy, due to smoke blowing in.

I have no photos from my first school, so I generated a Bing - Background and 2 Bing Layouts and put them together, the books are from CF, and Font is Archistico

Phil and I visited our local butterfly house which had many beautiful butterflies. However, in this project I just featured, in my opinion, the most beautiful of all--the Monarch. I followed Lab 7, no.2, for the grunge texture. All of the pictures are mine taken at the Butterfly house. The bridge was made into a watercolor using the cass watercolor script. All the masks for the butterflies are mine. The fonts are from CF--Capella for the text and the single letter is Butterfly Logos. I forgot who mentioned Lab 7, but thank you.

I threw something together for this one. Not especially good but it's got some things from high school years.

Another beautiful layout Sue. We are experiencing the same weather and smoke. I've been changing the three bird baths every several hours today. 6 crows in the yard most of the day with cooling off in the way your explained above. And lots of bathing. The water had black bits on the bottom and I wondered if it could be ash from the smoke. It's really quite bad. My eyes are stingy. I feel so bad for the animal/bird/insect world who has to live with the smoke. Yesterday before the smoke rolled in, we had crows, magpies and pigeons all on the ground in my tiny backyard, chillin' out (at the same time). Just last week there was a young crow and magpie hanging out together and it seemed like they were playing together, picking up a stick and then dropping it, then the other one would pick up the same stick and do the same. they followed each other around for quite some time and would fly up to the same perches on the roof, the power lines. I've never seen that before.

I'm having to change the birds bath water several times a day. I also have 2 small solar fountains which I have in what were shallow animal mineral tubs. The birds love a shower. I even have bowls of water out for the ground squirrels, rabbits and other 4 legged mammals. The corvids are social birds, also highly intelligent. They willingly interact with others as you have witnessed. I have to clean out the horses watering bowl daily, as the birds not only use it to drink from, but as a bath. Then there are the birds that use bird baths to dispose of their young droppings. Taking attention far away from the nest. We really don't need to provide food or water for birds, we do it purely to attract them for our own enjoyment. It's a huge lucrative industry.

I have taken a look on FB and you really can see the difference with the more compressed version here. I don't do much on FB and keep it just for seeing what is going on with the Campus and post there as well as here. It is a handy alternative if the campus site is down for whatever reason. It is a pity that there is smoke coming your way again. My daughter in CA told me that the wildfires are starting there too. At least we don't have many of those, although the last couple of years which were hot and dry, have made us here aware that we can get more fires too but they are so far on a much smaller scale. When visiting Yosemite this spring we drove for miles and miles along a road through the Sierra National Forest that had only blackened trees without any greenery.

Mine came yesterday! Today is planned....

I'm delighted! It was the mouth with the same smile from that little girl as you have on your photo here that made me think it had to be you!

Let's continue this new challenge. We might be the ones taking pictures but we are not the feature of our layouts, so let's change that since we ARE important and have lots to say. Every month or so, the layout will be about YOU, and a prompt will be given. If you have taken the Story Week Challenge, you will find some similarities but it won't be the same. For the July layout, tell us something about your school or school years. Do you have school photos? Do you have photos of your school? Do you have stories of things that happened at school, with other students, with teachers? Let's share. It might be a trip down memory lane for most of us! Remember that if you want to create pages for previous prompts, those threads will stay open. There is no right or wrong order to share about you.

I'd say I threw this together quickly and easily, but it wasn't quick. I dithered around with it for too long and just wanted to keep it simple to align with the challenge. BeaBea belongs to a friend. I have no kitty, over a year now.😢 Now that I've conquered the Interlacing Technique....you'll likely see it often! 😁

I was in one of my book/author groups on Facebook and one member had asked AI to create a portrait for the main character using descriptions from the books. Their attempt was fair so I decided to try. It was rather interesting as I had all the books in my Kindle collection so I could copy/paste descriptions directly from the author. The portrait AI created for me was quite popular in the group so I might even try it again some time. If anyone is familiar with the character Lucas Davenport from John Sandford's "Prey" series, here's the Bing Copilot DalE-3 version. (the scar is too prominent but otherwise the wolverine smile and sparkling eyes are right on)

I'll guess, even tho I have not read all of the posts yet. 1973! My first impulse was the year I graduated, cause I know there was a stoner on every bus I was on 😉 But the photo looks a few years earlier than mine.

Me too, I'm old, so "old" fashioned is the way to go. I don't want to rely on AI as I would feel like describing art would not really be my own work or vision. Like when I was a young child and used to ask my mom to draw horses for me. That's more like an art director hiring an artist, the art director may own the work, but the artist still retains the copyright (how does an AI retain a copyright anyway 😁). Still, there is a place for AI to streamline workflow, without creating the work for us. This is just what I think for me and how I want to move forward creatively. I'm totally loving what others create with AI's and love to see what they doing with it.

I should have also mentioned that I used Carole's banner 2 special font, which I bought. I'm hooked on creating banners at the moment, especially after watching the more recent master class on banners and pennants. Also used one of her punches, which I love. For the circle photo I used the technique I have demonstrated before. Personally, I prefer to use it on oval and circles rather than square or rectangle shapes. I did give instructions on how to create that effect, using vector shapes, to maintain clean sharp edges. As using the selction tool creates very jaggy edges on anything that isn't square or rectangle.

Love the layout and the details you included. And you got the lifted corner in there too!

It really pains me to reduce an image to 600 pixels and under 200kb. lol Saying that I understand completely why it is nescesary to do so. Although I did reduce the imgae for facebook from 6mb to 1.5mb. As you say facebook is a handy alternative on occassions. When the wild fires started last year, there were two hundered and so, this year when they started there were over 300 fires. Unfortunately, the wild fires have to be controlled due to more and more people wanting to live in rural areas. Wild fires play an important part in renewing and recycling ecosytems. Many of the trees planted today for commercial use, are quick growing, and are unable to withstand the fires like so many of the native plants and trees, which depend on the fires for their survial. Fires open up the forests canopy to sunlight, to encourage new growth, including tree saplings.

It was Susan Ewart who mentioned Lab 7-2. I also went to it and watched the videos. Some great techniques to use, as you did.

Here's my "School Daze" featuring the Washington Elementary School that was located directly across the street from my childhood home, which is also pictured on the lower right. Here is a photo of the school in the cass-schoolframe2. I used an old kit called SNU-BuckleMyShoe for most of the embellishments. The photo of downtown Rutherford, top left, has some cass-freebie photo corners. The fonts used are Copperplate Gothic Light and Bell MT. I used the curved photo script on the Classmates photo. Can you ID me in it?

Amazing what Bing can do and you certainly can give a good prompt! I think, for me personally, I will not be using this feature very much and I will doing things the "old fashioned way".

Congratulations, Corrie! Well done!

And Corrie wins the bragging rights! 🤩

Really? You want us to guess that? Just wanna enjoy all those adorable, innocent faces and the delightful layout.

I was thinking about my H.S. yearbook when I remembered a former classmate had sent me a copy of our sixth grade graduation pic. I used a whole bunch of elements from DS/PS. The font is Sketchzone. Now you have to guess which one is me!

I've scrapped all of my school pics already but don't have a small version to post. But I do have these 2 layouts about one of the elementary schools in town. It was torn down in 2010 and they let people go through it before that happened. My dad and his companion happened to be in town that weekend so we went through it. It had memories for me as I attended the school. It had memories for Martha as well since she taught there. In fact, that was where she met my mom and how the 2 couples became friends all those years ago.

There aren't many pix of me at any school, but I have lots of images of the village where I grew up b/c I research and write about it in history articles. Schools were so important in rural areas. Even the simplest and less fortunate families wanted their children to be better educated than they were. Our village got a beautiful new Continuation School (up to Grade 10) in 1909. It was a serious blow when that burned down in 1942, leaving teachers and pupils with no where to go. A new public school was built in less than two years, but the upper grades (to Grade 13) had to make do for SEVEN YEARS with classes in a rundown hotel. There are so many stories from those years! It was a major achievement by and for that village to get a district high school approved and opened in late 1949. It was equally heartbreaking when it was closed and then demolished. No more high school there since then. Students are bused to other area secondary schools.

When I saw this prompt about school, I thought oh-oh, not many pix available. I have spent my life avoiding being in front of the camera; hence there are not that many pix around, especially in those days when no one was carrying a camera around 24/7. We didn't have such a thing as Grade 8 graduation; I think I missed high school graduation (after Grade 13), and I also passed on both university ceremonies too. I was a pretty good student overall (it was expected at home). I was also into sports, but very traditional ones such as basketball and volleyball, track, etc. We didn't have a pool or tennis courts, or archery and fencing. You need to know that the village where I grew up was small, as well as the schools there. The peak population of the high school was about 200 students, but we put out some great teams over the years and brought home lots of trophies and other awards. So I finally found a photo (from the newspaper back then which is not great quality) of me in sports. I am No. 22 in the back row. Our school colours were green & white. The high school was torn down 🤔 in 1980.

This topic certainly was a trip down memory lane! It is a long time ago that I thought about my schoolyears. Surprisingly I have no memories at all about kindergarten, no photos to trigger my memory, no! Elementary however is different story. At the time I was 6 there still was a great shortish of schoolbuildings in Rotterdam in the after match of WWII and a gigantic babyboom. We lived in an area where a new school just opened its doors and it was a huge building at least for that time. It had 2 floors with grades 1,2 and 3 on the first floor and 4,5 and 6 on the second. Each grade had 2 or 3 classes with over 40 children! I was a tall and shy girl and was always placed on the backrow. I was a good student and hardly noticed by the teachers, which was fine by me! Because the school was offering after school music lessons my parents enrolled me in the course. We learned the music notations, about rhythm, instruments, practiced singing etc. The first instrument that everybody had to learn to play was a flute (recorder). I have very fond memories of those music years. When I was looking on Maps I found out, to my utmost surprise, that the building still existed and it still is a school! The only difference on the outside is that in my days there weren't sunshades. For my layout I used Carole's music sheet freebie and a stitch brush. The font is 212 music, the music staff and notes are by Janet Scott, the mask by Jessica Dunn, the flute from the internet and the metronome is a picture tube. I made the 2 wooden brads with woodburning effect.

I reworked the Corel graduation freebie to show my graduation back in 2000 from SUNY. Art is from their website.

I'm trying to make myself do something every day. Here's today's try. Can you guess what year I graduated?