Friday, August 26, 2011

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Meet my grandcats!

I'm very happy with the kids waiting on giving me grandkids. It means that I get to spoil my grandcats for a while! :)

Here they are, aren't they adorable?!?!

I am particularly happy with the chain in the background. I made it from scratch and wanted it to look like the chain they use for holding dog tags. I think it came out very well.

To make it, I set the spacing on my round brush at 150% and chose a light grey for the color. I brushed it on in a fairly random pattern and then reset the spacing to 1% and connected the dots. I connected them individually so it would look more natural. I played with the glass button, bevel, and drop shadow settings, but finally settled on the Wow Chrome Shiny Edge setting. It was a little darker than I wanted, and lightening it in the Enhance Color menu didn't have much effect. I found that by reducing the opacity just a bit I got a lighter metallic look.

Without other add-ons (I know they make several just for the metallic look), this is what I came up with! Let me know what you think!



Mother's Day Revisted and more blending modes

These two are more attempts to work with different blending modes and see what kind of results I can get.  I know that PSE can create some beautiful effects, I just haven't always been able to get what's in my head to translate to the screen.

This one is one of the older pics I mention below, one of the ones that got my inspiration flowing again. It's from a trip my friend Lisa and I took to Franciscan University in Steubenville OH back in the summer of 2000. It was for a Defending the Faith conference and we had such a good time. I'm really pleased at how with one came out-


Lastly, I have this one from Mother's Day this year-

Again I played with the blending modes on the two papers I used as the background, and I was pleased and surprised by the results. I also had a chance to use more traditional Photoshop skills on this one, as when we had gone out to eat there wasn't anyone around to take a pic of the four of us. Brian had joked at one point that he could just do this-
and I could Photoshop myself into that shot.

So I did! Not a bad job, but I can certainly tell. It was a fun project in any case, and now I'm feeling more inspired to keep scrapping!

Yikes! Falling behind again!

It 's been busy at work with the beginning of the new semester, and I'm just not feeling very inspired to scrap. So, I've been going through some older pics I've scanned over the years looking for inspiration. I found a couple, and that got me rolling again.  Here's what I've been working on lately:

For my Project 12 page for July-





My first real attempt at blending modes was on this collage from Peter & Sarah's wedding-



Mixed results in my mind, mostly because the photos I was using weren't the crispest ones. It all took too soft of a tone I think, but it was fun to play with!

Next up is poor Angel in her Cone of Shame-

 I snapped this pic of the first time I caught the two dogs napping anywhere NEAR each other, and used it in the Cluster Challenge over at DigitalScrapper.com-

 I think I now have 'logos' for for dogs!

I'll post the last couple up above (if you're reading this, you've probably already seen them!).