Michele

Annie, I think your layout is wonderful. After all, the real star are those two muddy children. :)

 

~Michele

Beautiful flowers, Sheila.

I haven't had a chance to participate yet, but I just looked at the forum and I just say how impressed I am. You have all done beautiful layouts. I love how different your layouts are even though they are based on the same ideas.

 

~ Michele

Great job, Mara!

Y = Yellow Mustard

 

Bonnie, I always love eXtra mayo LOL

I am in LOVE with Cassel's Custom Slats script.

 

~ Michele

For all the moms in the campus.

Q = Quinoa salad

Those are wonderful, Jan.

K = Ketchup for all those hamburgers and hot dogs.

F ~ Frankfurters

Ladies, you are too sweet. <3

Thanks, Dawn. I pulled the colors, more or less, from the pic. I followed Cassel's lesson on using the brush variance palette to vary the color of the flowers on my background paper.

Here goes nothing. I jumped off the fence and signed up for a membership. This is what I did with Lab 5-9. It's my first "real" scrapbooking page. I used a couple of flowers from Pixelscrapper and changed the hue on them. I made the background paper using a brush from a free set by gvl on DeviantArt. The main font is Baratta and the small font is Arista 2.0 Light. I took the picture about 10 years ago when I was on a walk. You never know when something will catch your eye.

 

Hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is finally enjoying Spring.

 

~ Michele

Thanks, Wanda. Believe me, the smile was not easy for me to do. I'm too much of a perfectionist (aka OCD). I didn't think to add it later. That's a great idea.

 

Wow, Sheila. I'm very impressed with your patience using the pen tool. Your result is fantastic. I have the Flaming Pear effects, too. They come in handy when I remember to use them.

 

~ Michele

Wanda (Sue), the only giggling is from me because it's so darn cute! (Do we call you Wanda, Sue, or Wanda Sue?)

 

Marlene, what a great idea. I also have a bunch of .eps files I've never used. I'll have to give that a try.

 

Now, you must understand that I cannot draw a thing with paper and pencil except for stick figures and even those are a bit iffy. I found a How to Draw a Bear pic on Pinterest. I used the ellipse tool for the majority of it and the pen tool for the mouth. (Is there a way to make a semicircle vector? The mouth took me forever.) I also discovered, after working to get different widths on some of the shapes, that once I exported it, all the lines were the same width. LOL Best lessons learned are when I screw up. :p

 

~ Michele

This is one big Love Fest!

Betty, your Eye in Hole cracked me up. I love it. Teri, I love your goat ribbon. I didn't even attempt the bow making class. I have one of Cassel's scripts so I skipped this one. The good news is that I finally got off the fence and got myself a Diamond membership.

 

Here's what I produced with the Negative Chevron ~ I thought they looked a little like steps in an Escher kind of way.

Dawn, that is absolutely perfect! I love the softness of the elements against the sharpness of that gorgeous picture showing through the panels. Really great job.

 

~ Michele

What a lovely layout, Cristina. I'll bet those babies are just as beautiful as your page.

Here is your queen of clipart with the pic for my gaming group for Earth Day. The font is Thisay that I just got for $1 from Creative Fabrica; it's got some great glyphs. I added the Earth and erased parts of it so it appears to be held by the hands. What I did was duplicate the hands, move it above the Earth, and lower the opacity. Then I could see exactly what parts of the planet I had to erase. The frame is a tube I made with free watercolor flowers I got from the Hungry JPEG. Then a few free butterflies for good measure.

Simply gorgeous, Dawn. I could go on and on about every detail, but suffice it to say I love your work, always.

 

~Michele

Thanks so much, Dawn and Cristina. <3

I'm going to need some time to digest everything I learned this weekend from the free Lab tutorials. Felt like I was cramming for finals, but in a subject that I really love.

 

In the meantime, I had some fun with the kaleidoscope effect for the background of my gaming group's theme today. The face is from my avatar in the game. I used a circular selection to crop her and turned her into a sticker thanks to Cassel's tips and tutorials section of the blog. (It's very helpful when she includes the tips in her newsletters.) I used a preset shape for the "petals" around her face then duplicated and resized each subsequent copy by 105%. They all started out as white until I changed the blend mode on every other one to overlay. The font is Mister Froggie. Finally, the framing was made by increasing my image size several different times and alternating flat thin white layers with increasingly larger layers that I filled with the background pattern to which I applied an inner bevel. Whew. Sometimes I can't believe what can be accomplished in just an hour or two while watching TV if I get inspired. Other days, I can't come up with any new ideas. Then again, today's theme, Festival of Colors lent itself to inspiration.

 

~ Michele

Rae, those are wonderful layouts. What a great experience the ranch must have been.

 

I'm glad so many of you enjoyed how I breathed new life into an older project. For those of you who liked the font, it's called MalemDiwa and I got it in a free font bundle from Creative Fabrica last month. I loved that it came with a lot of PUA's. The freebies from so many places are usually just demo copies.

 

~ Michele