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My May after lesson 4

My April after lesson 4

Whoops! I noticed that I haven't put my Tolkein button on the last couple of pages. So I went back and added one to each that had been skipped. But I'll only post the last March one I did.

July - August I forgot to mention, but I also added some of Corel's bird graphics freebies. Ballons from Janet Scott (ps_janet-scott_31183_tiny-but-mighty-3d-heart-balloons_cu)

May & June

Here I have two versions. One I'm playing with the date box - I just stretched it to see if I wanted it bigger (I do). I will watch the YouTube video Sue T mentioned and think about trying a different style. and I played with the frame/mask which I added a texture to and then a different texture to the background. since I'm wishy-washy on what I want to do, I'm going to try different things and live with them for a bit and hope a good idea comes out of it by the end. You'll notice my photos seem darkish, it was intentional, I seemed to be into the darker moody stuff when I photographed them over several months. They dont look great at this resolution though.

I'm also posting unfinished stuff because PSP is being quite cantankerous tonight. I am living with a few things in the mask to see if I want to leave it or delete the part in question - the stem running through the frame. I've cut it off completely from going out of the frame part of the mask, in one month, and cut off only in the frame part of another one month.

I'm slowly catching up. I'm learning a lot from what everyone is doing with the mask. Most of my photos are photographed with a black background for this so it's nice to see what everyone is doing to change it up. I'll decide on the texture and background changes later.

Thanks, Cassel for your note about the Artsy masks. They certainly make the area around the image more interesting. Also I learned a lot from your Day 3 video. The information on using the Character Map will be useful in other programs too. Day 4 you introduced the Transparency Lock, so great. I am waiting expectantly for what will come next. I am learning so much. Merci. Here are my March and April projects with elements from all 4 days.

March is blossom and April is bluebells.

March - April Chick - Corel-Easter-chick-5

Thank you for that suggestion, Donna. I was wondering the same thing since I had a square image. I took your advice on the inner bevel also and modified my March calendar to this:

I think this one looks wonderful with the stem showing. As much as we want to have a common thread throughout the year, I don't think you have to keep each month identical.

I finally finished March 1st calendar. The picture I developed from 2 AI pictures from CF Spark. The background paper is a gradient. I guess I'm playing with gradients because I need to practice making them.

Wow everybody has been so creative! Here are my preliminary pages 01 and 02, I managed to get something done. My theme is mushrooms/fungi and therefore I used cass-CustomCalendar script to make little mushrooms with the datenumbers in them. For the backgrounds I used background/foreground gradients but there will be some sort of texture on them, but I still have to figure out what I will use. My date mushrooms also got a matching gradient otherwise it was too monotone for my liking. The font for the months is Prida01. I have that font for a while now and the video tutorial reminded me of it! I'm not sure if I will change the dates for weekends and special dates; I'll have to experiment if that is going to work with those small mushrooms. I see I still have a black line on Januari and a point on the right top of februari; I'll change that, I thought I had done but it is still showing.

It's starting to come back to me. I went for a much simpler, cleaner look this time.

Wow, there's no shortage of creative stuff posted! There are so many different styles, tips, ideas, and inspiration.

Carole, repeating myself, I love these calendar artsy mask templates. After seeing some designers' work, I have been playing with this style for some time. I like the idea of a tutorial or class. 🙂

@Julian Adams I would suggest to go less with the bevel so the mask effect can show more (more obvious on the January page). For February, did you put the image only in the "center" of the mask? If you have a square image and a rectangular space, you can either crop it rectangularly, or do like you did and "fill in" the sides. If you want to resize the mask, you CAN do it, using the Pick tool, but make sure you will brush in black, the areas that will become uncovered on the sides. For the bevel, I tend to keep the Ambiance at 0 so the lightness stays as close to the original as possible. @Ann SeeberSince the mask creates a partially transparent section, that is why the layer below will show through. Maybe you can tweak it by brushing, with a solid color, where you don't want the pattern to show (or where you would want to add color). To adjust the Kerning, you highlight the character and reduce the Kerning value to narrow the space or increase it to spread them apart. It can be also very useful when you use dingbats, like stitching fonts. Adding color to the outside of the photo area is not something I expected, but all you, users, are so creative!!! @Sharla The white background might sound boring for some, but on your pages, it makes your photos stand out! @Sue Thomas Maybe someday, you could share "not-so-photogenic" models, just for a good laugh maybe? @Mary Solaas The days of the week abbreviated look so much more balanced! These pages are the perfect opportunity to work with gradients! @Art Kuiper Those masks are called "artsy". There are some designers who create great masks of that style. Maybe I should make a tutorial (or a class) on that type of mask. @Donna Sillia I guess you answered Julian's question about modifying the format of the mask! @Corrie Kinkel It is so great to read how you see "errors", and can fix them yourself with PSP. And experimentation also yields fantastic results. @Anne LampIf you follow what others have done, you can add a color that matches the photo on the layer called PHOTO HERE, and it will add some colors around your photos, through the masks.

Here are July (White Rhino) and August (Eurasian Eagle Owl). I'm finally figuring out how to play with the mask group to get different effects.

Well I have Day 1 calendar pages done. I used the day 2 Background instructions to liven the pages up. I also highlighted some dates as those are family birthdays that need to be remembered. These first two photos are from my library but were not shot in the wild. Hence the sad face on the gorilla. I struggled a bit this the mask until I realized from all the other submissions that they were designed to show through outside the frame. I like the effect.

And here's October - the Tapirs are designated Endangered. This zoo has a breeding program for them. The background paper is ID_AllThatsFall and the pumpkin sticker is from Sheila Reid.

Here is my preliminary for September. I'll be adding some journaling later on all of them. This is "Rooben" & Matilda the resident kangaroos. The background is a paper from a collection called Boho Digital Papers.

I love how cheerful and fun this is. Also really like the Tolkien quote.

I love your work and the low saturated, but high contrast colors you use. May I ask what font this is?

May I had to resize the mask since the photo was not a landscape. I merged the group and horizontally centered the image. The background was created in Adobe Express and modified with FF. Changing cass calendar font colors once the file has been merged is not possible. I think that I have saved some of the original files so I will be experimenting this afternoon. The mask for the cement statues is my own. Both photos are from David.

Here are my May (Flamingos) and June (Screaming Hairy Armadillo-yes, really!) May background is color fill with a citrus peel + noise texture and June is a paper. Is it possible to color the flowery background to the mask and the frame?

My finished June. I have been working on my calendars to make sure that they are consistent and adding major holidays. I decided not to use birthdays and anniversaries. I am not sure of the colors for June, although I love red, so this month may be changing. The elephant is an Asian elephant from Canva. My original elephant was African. David gave me a lesson on the differences.

I'm keeping with the white background for the dates since they may be used for writing in after it's printed. Also keeping with the Arial Black for the font. But love what everyone is doing with their calendars as far as font, background, etc. which are in the tutorials. So, I decided to play around with background, fonts and whatever else the tutorials tell us to do. This is one of the background papers I made (looking forward to the upcoming workshop). This is some of the fonts I played with (but not the glyphs since I seem to have chosen ones without extra glyphs. On the paper, I played with blend modes on both papers and on the smaller one I used the layer style of outer glow.

Wow! Thank you so much Julian. You have made my day. I had a log absence from photography and now it's become my passion again. This is a really nice font from Creative Fabrica called Daisy & Violette https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/daisy-violette-stylish-modern-serif/ It has lots of glyphs and is the style I like. One thing I found is when i was using it, the glyphs went outside the bounding box and were cut off. I realized after a while (a good long while!) that the BOLD was on and I had turned off bold by accident and there the whole glyph was. So when you are changing from the Arial Bold font, toggle off the bold on the tool bar above. At first I thought it was my font program.

yes please have a tutorial or workshop of artsy masks

Julian, that is the original template design for May. She turned it 90 degrees.

I want one! So cute. Love the backgrounds you are doing Ann.

Julian, I only use this bevel on the squares. I have a lot of different bevels as presets for different items. Most of the presets are from Carole's tutorials, e.g. I have presets for different types of flowers, glitter, fonts, frames, etc.

Thank you! I got the idea because in the photo of this script in the store is one item depicted as a leaf. Besides that I didn't want the normal boxes because the people that are going to get the calendar never write in those tiny boxes! However it is convenient that you can see with day of the week it is. It took me several tries to get it the way I like it.

Thank you for your help Donna. I find sometimes when I use that the image gets much darker than I wanted to. Do you have any suggestions how to control the darkness of the image? @Cassel Do you have any suggestions Carole?

What a fun idea! 🙂

Beautiful, Sharla! How did you get the green color on the mask? Oops, I figured it out, just add color to the PHOTO HERE layer. 🙃

Thank you so much. You have made my heart sing!

I haven't been posting my progress because I know we have to go back to prior days as we learn more. I'll post them when we're all done. I love what you've all been doing. This is a great group.

These flowers make my heart want to sing out SPRING IS HERE!

Fabulous eagle shot!

Do you select the squares individually? How do you do that without selecting the numbers too?

Often the best way! I always think its fun to see what emerges when we're just creating.

I havent added the background yet, but I agree with you, the grey makes them stand out. I will probably use a desaturated color when I add the background layer.

Ooooh, I LOVE Red Pandas! So sweet.

I have seen it I believe...and of course always meant to go back and try the techniques, then I see something shiny and forget all about it.

I agree Carole, the models I find to shoot are the best, saying that the majority aren't always cooperative to pose for a photo shoot. Those that are make the time and effort all the more rewarding. Lol

@Cassel I think you are right (as usual). Thank you. I've seen how various members have handled the days of the week and have decided to handle it by using the abbreviations since they are just 3 letters and will be easier to center over the blocks. Will take me a while to go back and redo the January's and February's and I have done one March so that one too. ONWARD!

February. These are coming out in unexpected ways!