Susan Ewart

Thank you Sharla. How lucky you are. I cant imagine what that must be like to see that many geese at once. I have many many bad photos and a few good ones. My timing is usually pretty bad. Thank goodness for digital, I can shoot a lot on continuous and hope I get something. I'm much better taking pictures of things that dont move.

I like the flower and the stem showing. The flower is bright so your eye naturally goes there, then it meanders down the stem with a huge payoff of the photo and in particular, the bench...which is the "Why" of the photo...The perfect peaceful place to rest and destress. I wont get into angles and triangle in photography, they are there too, a huge thing in composition. Great color choice in that flower; magenta based with green all around as it's complementary color.

I want to do the squares like you did and try effects on them. I did that in the Build A Kit workshop but didnt do squares, I did blocks of color and strips and rotated them, I found there was too much of one color. So many possibilites. I was just watching the the Distort It Masterclass (havent finished it yet) and there is a really cool paper idea I want to try out too.

It sure was fun and surprising. I was not liking my layout, it was too busy when it was a photo background and lowered opacity just looked grey and dull. Then I thought about blend modes and was moving layers all over when the happy accident happened. I could never have predicted what the blend layer (difference) would do since I had multiple layers with adjustment layers below it.

Project 4 I used the kit that came with this Project (cpjess-spring skies). But you wouldnt know it, unless you took a peak in my layers palette. I used the blue sky paper, duplicated it and turned it upside down so the clouds above were same below - but you wouldnt even see that now as it all blended in, all these two layers had adjustment layers applied to them and both paper layers had different reduced opacity. I used the blue paper (with newspaper writing on it) with a reduced opacity and above that layer I promoted a selection of it to make my pinking shear effect. And above that layer was a photo of mine of Canada geese flying into the pond. I didnt like the photo background look so I played with blend modes and chose "difference" and it made the birds look like a graphic and the pinking shear was lightened against the background of the same paper below it. I thought it looked interesting. Lots of this was me moving layers around and seeing what would happen with the blend mode. This again, was a happy accident. that works better with the two smaller photos. I made the other little strips of paper from the original blue paper and from the new brownish paper. Used also in the title. Font: NNSafari Serif (Creative Fabrica) Photos: mine This was shot on November 20, 2011 and these geese (over 800) had only 2/3rds of the pond as the rest was frozen, and they had to share it with about 6 other species that flew in. It takes about 10 minutes for the geese (coming from the farm fields nearby) to all get landed. the sky is black with Canada geese, it's really quite a site and fun to watch them come in for the landing. This is a very different kind of layout for me.

Thank you for the info on the font, it's a nice one. Where did you post your project 4? or did I miss it in this post.

Thank you Mary. It is a good (read: hard) challenge for me to use just one kit, make it work and be happy with the end layout. I'm learning that "playing around" and "happy mistakes" are a good thing. Also the photos from this one day of shooting werent that great (started sunny then got really grey and dark) so I'm also seeing if I can get acceptable ones to use. Good thing the bootcamp doesnt need a huge amount of photos.

The weather was going from sunny to really dark overcast that day. It was November and the day started out sunny, that's why I went to the park, but it turned quite dark very quickly. The water went from having blue sky to reflect on it to a grey sky. There is trees around the pond so there is also lots of shadow from them too.

Mother Nature does purple wonderfully doesnt she. The color geek in me wants to tell you Magenta-Blue is what I call purple and of course Blue is Cyan + Magenta. So we should be loving Magenta for pouring more of itself into the mix to make that wonderful purple we all love. But, I wont be a color geek and tell you that. ?

WOWZERS! This is beautifully done. One the smoky days we had last Wed, I came home from work and it was eerie because no birds were flying or singing, dead silence. A world without birdsong is a world I dont want to live in.

My hubby and I watch a lot of shows that are subtitled (I hate dubbed) and we often laugh at the translations.

I love the colors in this layout.

Project 3. I used the kit provided "Welcome Spring" from Digital Scrapbook and by DB Magnolia. And I used the orange glitters. Are you sitting down? Are you ready to hear this? I did not change the blue/white flower or the background paper. I did however change the glitters (darker) ?. I used the background paper twice, once for the background and once upside down for the mat behind the photos/glitters. I used the an extraction of the same background paper and added texture effect>texture> blinds, then added noise, then went back to try a different size blinds on a duplicate copy and accidently applied it again to the one with the texture already on it. it made it look more like stripes. Same for the bottom striped one, which I made darker. I used a scatter of little flower petals and changed the color to white (from pink) and reduced the opacity a lot. It might not show at this resolution. There was no metal element so I extracted a design (part of one) from a card in the kit and then changed the color and added an inner bevel, hoping it looks like metal. Fonts are: Shelly (title) and Robeek (quote). from Creative Fabrica or Google (as my font program came with google fonts as well). Quote: found on internet search "unlikely friends", but could not find who made the quote. it has "human" instead of "soul" that i added because, well, these arent humans. Photos: are mine from the the same photo shoot day, weird changing weather. The layout would have looked best if all the water was the same color as the one in the middle. I may swap out two photos from another photo day that has matching water.

Stunning! I love everthing about this. It looks like a photo from the 1800's. Really incredible, complex work. Thank you for the instructions. Very interesting to have different blend modes on the different layers.

Wow those Explore live cams have nice screenshot resolution. Do you get to watch them moving and choose your own screenshot. I will have to check that out.

Love this. Just because you arent into layout making right now doesnt mean your arent doing something meaningful. Play is one of the delights that sparks creativity. Keep on doing what you are doing and the layouts will come when they are ready. I too feel like I'm behind in stuff I'm doing and taking a note from your playbook today I think I will do some photography and see where it takes me.

Great idea. what cool shapes you could make into brushes or tubes as well. Or a mask in the middle. So much possibilities.

Your papers are beautiful. I particularly like the texture on the background light blue one.

Your custom gradients are very beautiful. I like the choice of greens that you used with this.

This is beautiful and thank you for all your explanations. The white -10 offset on the drop shadow is brilliant. It pops out the title more.

This photo really matches the layout perfectly, it's very dynamic. Love the color combo as well.