Mary Solaas

So, I have the Title and the Table of Contents

@Ann Seeber Thanks. I wasn't sure about the giraffes. It was so hot that day and I wasn't feeling well that week, but it was my daughter's and my staycation and I bullied through. But we didn't get to the aquarium or any further in the zoo. I bet I could do a whole alphabet from that zoo. But that will have to wait - too many sticks in the fire. That Aquarium alphabet that Carole gave us is so neat - I though about my pics from the Chattanooga Aquarium, but haven't gotten that far yet. And here it is the middle of July!!!!! I also have been looking at the P52 thread and gotten a few of my pics from the different weeks - both Canon camera and the phone camera. I might be able to come up with the 25 or so weeks that have passed. My - time does fly (think of Susan Ewart and her Time kit).

Finally - Z is for Zoo. This is almost the completion for the 2022 Alphabet Challenge. My theme was alphabet soup since it was random choice for each letter. @Ann Seeber I'd appreciate your proofreading skills on this one.

Spark is good, but you have to know what you want and be able to express it. Anja really has the knack to get something glorious out of it. With Spark, I got my Andy Warhol cat that I love, but I had to work at the wording to get it. Use Anja's wording with Spark and see what you come up with!

Sometimes I feel like I'm in a candy store! Definitely can over-indulge! Gluttony?????

This is the one from Anja's description (You are my sunshine)

@Anja Pelzer Wow! I played around with that Bing Copilot. I started with your take and ended up with just typing boy and girl walking in a meadow beside a bubbling stream with mountains in he distance.

Time to get back to the labs - also I have the final layout to do for the Alphabet Challenge from 2022. Those blue water drops are there only because it is required for this lab module. But I guess they are ok. The fish going in opposite directions on the background paper are also required. I made 2 fringe mats and used this one cause I like it better. The other one I'm not showing because the fringe is large - kind of reminds me of the fleece pieces that were fringed - something the fabric shops were promoting several years ago. I might put a baby blanket pattern on it and use it for a baby layout sometime in the future. I used some elements from Pixel Scrapper and my own elements created in a previous lab for the cluster on the mat. Used one of the labels made in the vector workshop from last year for the title tag. The brad is from Pixel Scrapper also and probably Jessica Dunn.

Still playing with stuff from Vector workshop - Mickey at the Beach

J:ust playing around. Had fun.

I just discovered something. I was working in the vector workshop again and making elements. I made a leaf which I may show later, it is where I discovered something. When you create a vector shape and are using more than one shape, that vector shape when you bring it into a new layout has all the elements that made it up actually separate. I had made a shield in the previous vector workshop that used 2 elements to make it. When I use it, I can make each element a different color as shown in this screenshot. How neat is that???

@Daniel Hess thank you.

@Daniel Hess Daniel, I am fascinated by your USA map. I have used a jpg or png of the map with the states drawn on it and then drew on it the route of where our trip took us. I would love to have a copy of your map with the state lines drawn in as a preset shape. Possible???

Love the soft colors and how they point up the picture.

@Susan Ewart Yeah - I'm getting to like those layer styles. They come in handy sometimes! You did a great job as usual. I like those frames also. And the cutout strip at the bottom.

Still working on the workshop. Need to practice. This time I made the outline of the dinosaur, exported it as a shape, used it and changed it to a raster shape and painted it using the paintbrush with the lock tool and this is what I came up with.

Lesson 7. I've had quite a time with this but this is what I came up with - both A and B.

@Corrie Kinkel Yes, I did hide the path of the circle. The green circle is part of the globe preset shape.

Lesson 6. I'm going to have to work hard on this path business. It seems that I've forgotten a lot! With the Globe of the earth, I had to put another circle around the outside of the globe as the maps of north and south america are also open and thus a path. The leaf was interesting - made the leaf last year in the vector workshop and using it as a path this year, I fooled around with different picture tubes and finally settled on the stars. The letter - I had already worked with it several days converting text to a path and this time no problem. I used a string created earlier.

Lesson 5. I can't believe the trouble I've been having with the text tool and the path. Anyway, I managed to get the text to go along the path on the mountain and the circles paths for the cup of coffee and piece of pie. I know - the piece of pie doesn't look like much, but that's all I've got this afternoon for it. It is what it is!!!!!

@Cassel I guess I just assumed that the text always appeared in the layer below - but I checked several of my pspimage layouts and it doesn't. So either I use the pen tool or click on Properties>convert text to curves in order to get a path to use with the Vector tube script. This is the one I made using the Properties>convert text to curves

@Mary Solaas That life preserver was a perfect shape to do a cutout! For the text, I see that one is a Text object and the other is a Path object. What did you do between the two? @Cassel - I used the text tool as I normally do and typed my text. Normally, the text shows up in the layer beneath and is not blank. To get it to show up in the layer underneath I used the pen tool. I've never had to do that before. If I wanted to use the vector tube script on a letter, I just typed the letter and it was a path. So, I'm not sure what happened this time.

These are the screenshots of before and after using the text tool

I had an interesting thing happen - haven't noticed it happening before. I opened a blank canvas and set my picture tube to rope. I then selected the tool "text" and typed the word. It shows in the layers pallet correctly until you look at the layer inside that is supposed to show the work typed - it's blank. I closed and reopened the software. and tried again - same thing. So the Vector tube script won't work because there is nothing in the text layer - this morning - HOWEVER I FOUND THAT IF I THEN SELECT THE PEN TOOL AND RIGHT CLICK ON THE BLANK LAYER THAT HAS NOTHING IN IT (BECAUSE THE PEN TOOL HAS "CONVERT TO PATH" CHECKED), THE WORD TYPED THEN APPEARS IN THE CORRECT LAYER AND THE VECTOR TUBE SCRIPT WORKS FINE. THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME BEFORE. IS THERE SOMETHING I MIGHT HAVE DONE WRONG IN SELECTING THE TEXT TOOL???? OR ARE THE GREMLINS VISITING ME AND LAUGHING THEIR HEADS OFF!

Lesson 4 - finally! Requirement was to do the cutout. I chose to do the life preserver from the summer group. Had quite a time getting it the way I wanted it to be in the preset shapes, but I finally accomplished it. I then used it and this is the result. I duplicated it and then hid it and rasterized the duplicate. I used inner glow on the layer styles, inner bevelled it (regular way - effects), then added the dark blue wrapping. Everything worked out fine this time.