Susan Ewart

All the answers you need, just a click away!

 

or something to that effect.

 

All the inspiration...

 

All the tutorials....

 

All the .....

Thank you for the bigger picture Sue. I did read about how they are also endangered in Alberta.  They are so beautiful.  Hard to believe they are part of the weasel family.  Predation probably keeps disease down (in the ground squirrels) and then the strong, healthy ones pass on their genes.  How lucky you get to see them.  I cant wait to see photo's from your trip.

Sue, can I have a drop of your energy?  Fabulous calendar.  Is that a badger?  I just read about them in Nature Alberta magazine, they are so cool.

Here's what I mean when I want to learn about blending.  I have these video tutorials (Creative Live) but it's in PS and it was way over my head when I watched them.  They are composites but with lots of blending of layers and using layer styles and all of the above mentioned in the forum here.

 

As an example, the beach one has, near the top (above the words), the lid of a garbage can from a city park and it was blended into this background for effects/texture and you wouldn't even know it.

 

They are beautifully blended (believe me there is a lot of different layers in these layouts) and you cant see any hard lines from the different layers.  I'd like to be able to learn that.

Cindy!  What wonderful news for you.  Congratulations to you and all the lucky winners.

Wow Michele, I love this.  I miss seeing your Fab Divas layouts.  You matched everything perfectly, that background and the models dress goes so well together.

Pirkko, welcome back.  What happened?  Your posts started at #1 again.

Another fun script.  I need to do more practicing to get as nice ones as Ann.  But happy with how easy it is.  I will play with different settings too to see what I like best.  I used the colors from the image for the colored matt.  And the frame as well, but I choose a darker version of the what I selected with the color picker.

I really want to learn how to blend well too.  I did watch a PS tutorial but I'm not good enough to extrapolate PS techniques to PSP yet.  I'll go look for that tutorial.  I think there might be a blending master class too.

Wow! Corrie, that is a stunner.  I love the consistency of the backgrounds and the font.

H and Ann, great layouts.  Ann I love the texture you did in your frames.  I love that framed look.  I just bought the ankscript (10 min. ago) and cant wait to try it out.  You sure have great subjects (cant go wrong with cats, dogs or any critter really).

 

Bonnie, I totally forgot about that method.  Wonder if it would go through the dishwasher.  You know how hard it is to get packing tape off of stuff, it might be durable.  And I know there is a crystal clear packing tape, I'd go for that one to keep the image saturated.

Awesome Rene, I'll have a look tomorrow, I need to watch the master class too.  But first I need to get some newer, younger, bionic-er grey cells to remember all this stuff.

Project 5 - Concentration.

 

the name is what I needed most this time (concentration).  Something happened that really slowed down my PSP.  I think in making the journaling vector I had a weird blip (PSP was acting weird) and something happened.   Luckily my husband gave me ideas to figure out why (after he did a bunch of CPU tests) and he noticed my file was 1.09 GB...yes that's Gigabytes!  What the heck.  I ended up having to copy and paste each layer to a new canvas,  it was under a 100 MB's.  I have no idea what happened.  At that huge size, every click took about 30 seconds to happen.

 

The photo is mine. The weed/flower is mother nature. The papers/elements are Digitalscrapbook.com, and fonts are Creative Fabrica and Windows (Carade, Wide Latin, Arial).   this was a ride for sure.

 

Marie Claire, STUNNING!  I too saw something like this and did a screen shot of the layouts as inspiration.  I had no idea how to even make it.  This is really beautiful.

 

Mary, I love that layout and the colors are so perfect.

 

Lynda, what a great graphic, I did try the CF spark.  it's pretty cool.

 

Monique, after you create your image for your cup/mugs, what do you use to get them onto the mug.  Or do you send them to a photo store.  They would make great gifts.

Carole, I have masks in the folder you mention, but how do I access them from PSP?

Oh, this new Palette Maker 2 Script is FUN!  And addicting.  The results are art in itself.  I wasn't expecting it to be so easy and fast.  Here's my tests.  I did the default choice 8 colors and choose with the Hex.  Love that it's on a different layer so I can choose to use the photo/palette with or without the Hex.  Then, I tried 12 and 15, I love the look of more strokes.  BTW I really like the brush strokes.  Another cool thing is it makes a copy of the original photo then makes the palette/photo combo.  But the cool thing is the copied photo is really neat looking. It could also be something to use in a layout.  I didn't edit my photo's so they might look a little off colored, my monitor seems a bit on the warm side.  Hoping new monitors come into my life soon.

 

Thanks for the heads up Lynda.  I don't use Hex codes, I'd probably leave them off and use the dropper to pick the RGB anyway.  but I will get the un-glitched version because I might one day want to use them (Hex).

Wow Lynda, that is so cool.  I also purchased it and hope to try it out today.  Love the colors that it picked.

Thank you, Ann.  Your color combos are always spot on, so this makes me very happy to hear.  They seem to be my go-to colors; Cyan-Blue and it's Yellow-Red compliment, and also Analogous Complimentary and Split Complementary schemes. Okay, I just love all color, all schemes and all color flows.  Yes, they are just like dandelion fluff but much hardier.  I can move them around without them falling apart.  Recently, I was out in an industrial area one night to shoot the moon and there were ginormous ones like dandelions, that come from the really big prickly weeds.  It was a comical sight; me and hubby trying to manage my camera, tripod, camera bag and two of these big fluff balls, traversing over a dark field full of ground hog holes and into the car.  One got home safe the second one suffered some injury.  They are so big I'm not sure I can shoot with enough depth of field to get it all in focus.

Project 4 - Busy Bees.

 

the photo's are mine from a spent Clematis flower that grows in-between the boards of the fence on my yard and my neighbours yard.  Neither of us know where if came from.  It has really pretty flowers and tries to take over my neighbours lilac.  the little birds like it and the flowers are pretty but we do have to keep under control.  It's a zombie plant; un-killable, it will probably outlive the apocalypse.

 

All the papers from Digitalscrapbook.com. Dandelion seeds from Creative Fabrica.  Fonts as well: Adam Melda (days of the week), Maheer Bright (Fabulous), The Hunter (Frazzled) and Arial (windows -To)

 

I built the page mirrored from the sample because the flowers look like they are looking inward instead of outward.  I like the eraser tool exercise.

 

Sue, holy wow, beautiful.

 

Pirkko, I love that layout, what a great effect.

 

Happy Birthday Shirley, love that page.

 

Bonnie, winning anything is always so exciting.  I like what you did with the masks.

I second what Corrie and the above said.  The Campus came into my life during a stressful time and gave me something positive to look forward to.  I am immensely grateful.

Project 3 Friendship - I used mostly the kit in the lesson(from Digitalscrapbook.com).  I did make a paper; flood filled with color then added a texture effect (the darker solid paper).  Fonts from Creative Fabrica (likely) are Hamilyn (title) and Hallow Spire (quote).  Photo's of my cat girls not long after we adopted them.  They started out hissing at each other, after two weeks of being kept separate as one was sick.  By the second week this is what they were like.  I wasnt sure if I would like this color scheme, but it's growing on me.

 

I have been posting the credits in both the forum and the gallery.  I do admit I liked clicking on a layout and seeing it bigger.  I also enjoyed running through the project 3's the gallery tonight.

 

Project 2 - Adventure Park....well Adventure at the Water Park in this case.  I oriented the photo on the left side because the birdy action was drawing my eye to the right.  Papers, flower and two birds (the spitting image of the real blue jays that come to my yard ?) come from Digital Scrapbook, the fonts are all windows, Gill Sans Ultra bold, Gill Sans MT and arial for the writing on the side of the photo.  I love Gill Sans Ultra Bold.  I stretched it up a bit to make it taller.  The photo is mine.  There was a furry of LBJs (little brown jobs - what we call little birds) to one of my 3 baths.  I didnt get to my camera fast enough, at one time there was about 7-8 in the bath at once.

 

Ann, "Toe-Beans"...that's hilarious.  And I concur about Pirkko's layouts, they are are always so well designed and  inspirational.

 

Lynda, that story gave me goosebumps.

Project One done.  Photo is from my summer photo project that keeps on going (taken October 10th, when it should have snowed already but was over 20 degrees celcius!).  Papers and hearts from Digital Scrapbook.com. Font is El Capistrano Serif from Creative Fabrica.  I used pictures tubes from PSP as my scatter as I couldn't find scatter that I like.  Carole did you make these picture tubes (in PSP in just says "flower - and then a number).  They came in very handy.  I put an outline on the title so it would show up a bit more, I wanted it subtle so I didn't make the yellow vibrant.

 

Good work from everyone, enjoyed the layouts I've seen so far.