Daniel Hess

Here it comes @Mary Solaas LOL. (2nd upload...I deleted the first one and subsequent post...wanted to lighten the background a bit). Now that I'm in the groove being registered in the class, this one is "Project 1".

You did GREAT. I wish I had thought to put a stirring spoon on mine for the coffee. Your background reminds me of MANY picnic tablecloths that my mother would use over my growing up years. Keep it up !

Gotta use only the "finest" wedding reception ready "Great Value" brand decorative paper plates, saucers and cutlery. And the sandwich would be a "Dagwood" version of Carole's club sandwich.

At some time during the bootcamp, I'll probably try to incorporate this photo I took in Santa Maria, Spain of this gentleman. Of course at the time I was using a 0.3 Megapixel Sony Mavica camera that used a 3.5 inch floppy disk as film. I have a ton of photos taken with that camera during my navy days. I've tried amping up some of those photos to 300 dpi (turning them into huge photos) but even hard for PSP's AI resizing capability to overcome some of the resolution difficulties. It doesn't do enough to let some of the other photo fixes to truly do a good job. See the other photo LOL for a look at the camera (and the photographer).

Tried going in through the Workshops (I am logged in as Diamond Member) and for the Bootcamp it keeps asking me for a password and when I type in my password it just goes back to asking for a password. Just to make sure I tried one of the other workshops and went right in as normal. I'm sorry but maybe there is too much solar activity and it's messing with my electronics. That weirdness with the paintbrush last week (and continuing) and now this. 'Shrugging my shoulders'.

Pretty cool. I recently added a second monitor to my set up so here is a current screen shot. It helps alot to be able to watch one of the tutorials or master classes on the left, while working along with it on the right.

It sort of tells the story itself but there is some additional "back-story". When my siblings and I were VERY young, my mom's sister, Aunt Molly was into ceramics and made each of the three (at that time) kids a figurine. She painted them and made sure the hair color was correct for each kid. Mine was the baseball kid. (PS, my brother Rick's is in one of the pictures, the blond astronaut). After my Mom passed away in 2005, I came back into possession of "my" figurine". Also, I had always loved the three gold leaf paintings they picked up in Spain and I now have them displayed in my home. One item each inner corner with two additional photos, showing the item displayed in my parent's home back in the day, and one showing the item displayed currently in my home. Additional note...with the figurine, when I joined the Navy, my Mom incorporated it into the home decor whereas previously it had always been in my bedroom. Also, my grandmother made each kid a ceramic lamp with the same hair color thing (I think Molly and she were attending a ceramics class/workshop together at the time). Mine was unfortunately broken at some point in the past.

Another project been working on and finally finished. Granddaughter is 16 now and we haven't been having that exchange for a few years but when she was small for several years, I got her going during visits and on the phone (they live in Austin TX) by telling her Vanilla RULZ !

Actually I modified the "brand"...when you look at this...the black will be raised i.e. burned into the wood and the white will be blank. Got it ordered...will be "small", essentially about 1.8" x 2.0".

Here is the cutting board and the finished preset shape (to send in to be made into a "branding iron"). This is her first one and she is sending it to a friend in Florida.

Most current project. My wife is a Feng Shui Master (studied with Joseph Yu in Toronto) and at some point about 25 years ago, she commissioned an artist to design a logo for her. The artist came up with two and she chose and mostly has used one of them over the years. She is now into woodworking and is making kitchen cutting boards. She wanted to turn her logo into a branding iron (type "branding iron for wood" into amazon.c o m). I am turning her logo into a preset shape outline that can be used to make the branding iron. Obviously it won't have the yin/yang COLOR scheme but I can make the outline so it is definitely HER logo and can be turned into a "one-dimensional" (?) tool to "sign" her woodwork. Here is the logo I'm starting with.

I usually do that. I didn't turn on grids to make the chess pieces all proportional to each other...I just put up a small canvas and put 'one each' of the shapes onto it. AND I did fix the anomaly. I had to delete the shape file then re-export it. After that everything synched up. Good thing because I had wanted to have the "default" width for the strokes a bit larger than I had when I originally exported/saved the file.

Among other things, been playing around with creating pre-set shapes (vectors) a little bit. The last one was one that I converted from some I found that were listed as vectors (I think psd format?...for photoshop?) but really weren't so had to work on it in PSP. I'm hoping I saved the chess pieces as pspimage because I did something wrong...the shapes in the preset shape drop down do not match up to the shape that gets drawn . When I do the shape, the names are correct in the vector objects so not sure where I went awry on that.

Egg (Hard Boiled) ... or even "Easter" with colored shell.

OK..this one was fun.... Note: the background is a combination of two papers from Merisa Lerin and the crayon border was from Janet Kemp. Got all three at digital scrapbook.com.

I have posted 7 projects in the Gallery under the Workshops/Masks Workshop after I got motivated and did the workshop a couple of weeks ago.