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I had trouble with the clusters tutorial and needed to have more time to digest it. Sheila's practice of labelling each layer in the cluster sounded worthwhile. I rejoined, albeit late, (busy bank holiday weekend!) for the cast shadow. I did wonder at the time about the highlight on the pin head and thought if the head was a large sphere, it probably would catch the light in that position so it didn't look bad to me. I didn't see a link to a quiz so not sure what your results were about. Thank you again Carole for your ideas and tuition and thank you participants for all the useful suggestions.

Lesson 5

I took a stab at the Steel Diamond Plate Texture in Lab 11-2 Experiment 3. And a "stab" is about what I would call it LOL. Tough one.

@Cassel That composite was in a long-overlooked folder. I initially created it to help my mom, who was in early dementia, visualize the trees before they were planted. I never added shadows to it, so this was a good opportunity to experiment. It also gave me a chance to practice sky replacement. Thanks for another great workshop. I always learn something new.

Leçon 4

Thanks, Suz. I have officially adopted her into our household. My two senior cats have certainly perked up! They are now doing pretty good with accepting her. Only some growls and, at first, hissing. The tapeworm showed up in her poop, which was conveniently deposited on my bedroom rug, instead of the litter box. I might not have seen the worm if it was buried in cat litter. I'm sure the poor baby feels better and she's still eating "like a horse!" Here's a better photo to which I added a marisa lerin frame from a current mini kit. This shot was in full sun coming from behind Brandy, so I fiddled with my iPhone camera settings and was pleased with this result.

Lesson 3

Lesson 2

X = Xylography "An art form that involves engraving on wood". Sounds interesting and adventurous for anyone like me who avoids sharp implements!

my quiz link came in an email like the lessons emails came. Maybe check your spam in case it went there instead.

Same here, and I got another wrong as well.

This is my Tortoiseshell cat, Brandy, who has been living in quarantine with us for 3 weeks until she had her final vaccination, microchip and de-wormer. I have kept her confined to my bedroom and Tuesday, Aug 20, Robyn Stuart from Dumped/Stray Animal Rescue came to the house, gave her the necessary treatments and said I could introduce Brandy to my other two cats on Friday Aug 23. Robyn said the vet estimated her age at about one year. I know she only weighs 5 pounds now and when she started here she was only 3 pounds so I've been stuffing her. Luckily, she's a good eater. She presented me with a large tapeworm so I know the treatment worked. She is rather exotic looking, with those intense yellow eyes and mottled coloring. I tell her she's ready for fall. She was one of the strays I was feeding so you can see her ear has been clipped for TNR when she was spayed but I wanted to keep her inside with me. She's not at all feral.

Jnet you have done a lot of work and have almost cached up in one go. Nice hand drawn shadows!

My take on the sketch. I didn't do an exact replica of that sketch but kept enough of it to make it recognizable. I used the mask from the mask workshop 2-extra because it is square in a way. The background is made with 2 papers and a blendmode/opacity until I got something I liked + some ink splatters. Edge punch from Carole. Font is Christmas Mother and arial for the text. Made a little cluster with different shadows as in the shadow workshop and the elements come from my stash with the flower from Marisa Lerin and the ribbon is made with the curly ribbon script by Carole, Oh and I took the colors from my photo.

Well, three years ago, I fell on the stairs. Over time, they became "off-level". One morning, it was raining slightly, and I was holding my grandson's hand (he was just 12 months old), and my shoe slipped on the uneven step. I had a bad fall. My grandson did too, but he only fell ON the step. I had a nasty bruise for weeks. We added a 2x4 where I could at least hold something and the stairs were leveled within days. My husband also bought that anti-slip paint and painted all the steps with it (it is like paint with sand in it).

Wonderful news Ann. She will have the best kitty life living with you. Glad to hear your cat girls are coming around to her. She looks very soft, I love that rust colored line down the middle of her face.

What a nice surprise for you. That's looks like a really fuzzy bee.

Exactly! Just looking around my office I have shadows coming in from all directions. Some are harder than others. And they go all directions since some are from windows and others are from lights. One item on a wall actually has shadows on both the left side and right side. Window is to its left and a lamp is to its right. As one scrapper told me once shadowing is subjective and to develop a personal shadowing style. She also said that there isn't always one single light source... unless you are in a controlled environment (like a studio). Also coming from a paper scrapbooking background, there were differences in shadows when looking at the page depending on something as simple as how you are holding the page as well as what time of day or whether you are inside or outside which have different light sources. She uses PS to scrap and always starts with the same basic settings but tweaks them as she builds her layout. I always used to stick to the top left light source on my layouts but as I've progressed and learned from those I admire over the last 15 years, I've become more subjective about shadowing. Funny thing is, when I give the books to my cousin that I do for them, the layouts that get the most compliments are my more recent layouts where I've experimented with shadowing. That makes my heart happy. This workshop though has taught me some new tricks that I can use to further refine the shadows on my layouts. I used the warp trick today on a butterfly on a layout. It looks like it is flying!

These are really nice! Maybe you had cross lighting, yet still from overhead, just angled and one light with more intensity than the other. I use it in photography. It depends on the light; hard light soft light, the size of the light source, light bouncing in either by ambient light or a reflector (scrim) and especially the distance of the light to the subject which will determine the light drop off (think of the inverse square law) and how hard and/or soft a shadow is. for example, in side lighting you can get a hard shadow and fill some of it in with a reflector and keep some of the hardness in an area with a flag or a black reflector (which of course doesn't reflect at all). Since I work with continuous lights and low shutter speed my stuff is very contaminated with ambient light bouncing all over. At least I'm practicing set ups for when one day my pipe dream comes true and I own studio strobes. So, really I guess we shouldn't sweat it cause somewhere a real life situation will look just like that and you'll be like hey, check that out, life imitating my layout!

I just wanted to say this has been very informative. I have watched each days vid and played around some. I don't do a lot of clusters, ribbons etc. but if I do, I have all the links saved including the link to this page. I have read a lot of Cassel's comments to each member and some of the comments by other members. There is a lot of useful info in them that I may use at some time. Thanks Cassel and everyone that posted there projects and or commented on others.

Using BFCoffee by JBS, font Aesthetica Vintage, my own photo,

Week 34 I was lucky to see two herons on a recent walk. One flew down the stream, the other kindly stayed in place so I could take a photo.

I didn't have to think long which photo would be my photo of this week. This is an extremely lucky shot which I took last Sunday when I was staying with our son and daughter in law. It was taken during a walk in our National Park "Hoge Veluwe" where the heath is in bloom at the moment. I didn't even realize there was a bee in this much bigger photo, only at home when I looked at my photos of the weekend on the PC I noticed it. I was taking a photo of a nice clump of blue harebells (grasklokje) and found a little bee too.