The MScraps June Memory Mix!

MScraps has begun a new event, the monthly "Memory Mix" where you get to mix and match elements & papers from a common color theme. I chose "Tea Party", and cooked up some super-romantic, vintage-y papers & elements:



and



The deal on these is that you receive a discount via coupon. Just spend $10 and get 20% off using the coupon code MM20OFF; $10-$15, and get 25% percent off (coupon code MM25OFF); and $15 or more, 30% off with the coupon code MM30OFF. These will be valid through June 14, 2013, for the Memory Mix products only.

Here are some awesome pages from the CT, just to show you what can be done:

By Julie:



By Lisa:



By Vera:



By Jo-Anne:



By Margje:



Enjoy!

More Art Journaling Stuff

Not sure why, but my creativity is leading me this way right now, so there ya go! This week I have for you:

AJB-Painted Papers 2

AJB-Words 1

AJB-Flowers 1

AJB-Scribbles 2

AJB-Alphabits 1 & 2

AJB-Alphabits Squared

And, I even scrapped!! *lol* Really, I don't know what's gotten into me...

And Julie scrapped too:

And Katja did one with Colors of Sweet:

I hope you all have a lovely weekend--ours is going to be full of rain, so I guess I'll be drawing, or something! *laugh*

WhooooooooHOOO! INSD SALE & Papers Galore!

That's right--for INSD everything of mine is 50% off! Plus I have some gorgeous papers for sale--Simple: Colors (also sold singly) are paper packs with 10 solids apiece, each grouped by color, each of them UNIQUE!

You can get the 10-packs singly for $1.00 apiece during this sale, or the whole kit and kaboodle for only $5.00!!! Not bad for 110 papers, eh??

Here are some awesome layouts featuring these papers:

By Jean:

 

By Julie:

By Ulla-May:

and by me:

 

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and have tooooooooons of time to play--Happy Mother's Day to those of you in the US, who are mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers!

Dollar Day Deal: Butterfly Kisses!

Do you know about butterfly kisses? It's the very soft dance of your partner's eyelashes fluttering against your skin... ooh la la! This is a paper pack of 9 rich, patterned papers with lovely variations of flowers and butterflies (quite innocent, trust me! *lol*). I think they'll be great to cut up and use as bits of accents with other kits.



And Vinnie Pearce came out with the sweetest little fireperson kit, it's just adorable! Here's a layout with a few of the elements:



Isn't my little town great? Every day, Frankie the fire chief brings her little goats to work, Oreo and Buttons...

Everything with Vinnie Pearce's Little Fireman (Pixel Canvas). Font: News Gothic Standard. Journaling reads: "It can't be a real fire station without goats when you live in Yachats."

And also, I had fun once again participating in the Pixel Canvas Photo Swap Challenge, and scored Neat Freak (Lorraine) as a partner. She sent me a fabulous pic of the ocean during a weekend trip to Ireland:



Credits: Everything Vinnie Pearce (Pixel Canvas). Background paper from Weathered Greens. Masks criss-crossing photo/page from Page Masks - Set 03. Paper used for masks from Playing In The Snow (heart pin is also from that kit). Little heart and staples from I Live For, and button from Thank You. Frame from School Days. Font is Bradbury Sans Light.

And, do you know? I have a big secret to share with you. Next week. Hehehehehe.

Dollar Deal and a Peek-A-Boo

Here's a cute little hand-drawn patterned paper pack on textured stock, for only one dollar all day tomorrow:



And here's a simple hello:



A scraplift of Miss Bubbles's "Me" at Pixel Canvas

Everything by Vinnie Pearce, Pixel Canvas. Striped papers from Woodlands Park: Boys, stitching and button from Bucket Full of Sunshine, doodle from Safari Street, wordart from Playing in the Snow.

Flowers And Birdie, Redux

Ok, remember this little guy? I love how this came out, but do you think it would be useful as a scrapping paper?? I didn't use a single drop of paint on this, by the way. It's all dodging and burning and saturating the underlying piece of paper...



Thanks to "Splendor & Demise" on Flikr for the use of the great paper texture!

Rays Freebie

I've been noticing an increased incidence of sun-ray paper, recently--no doubt a take on retro. As I happened to find a tutorial on creating your own ray papers (at photoshoproadmap.com) that makes use of the duplicate-and-transform-again method (alt+ctrl+shift+t), I thought I'd go ahead and share the results. Just in case you need more rays! [no longer available, sorry]

Photo Papers Freebie

Found a fun challenge over at ASDSdesigners.com: make papers using public domain images (I used the 6 they suggested from publicdomainimages.net). It was a fun and challenging couple of hours, and here are the results [no longer available, sorry]:



It's not as easy as you might think, especially as the initial photos are quite small (about 3x5 @ 300 dpi). Here are some close-ups:



I don't like all my solutions equally, but I'm pretty pleased overall... =)

In other news, my Ooh la la, Artsy! Shop! is going to be changing from an immediate download link to a simple paypal link, and I'll e-mail customers when I get notification of payment (or within 24 hrs). I know immediate gratification is expected nowadays, but since nobody's really shopping, I can't afford the fees for the service that generates those (e-junkies). I guess I don't have to worry about it too much, since nobody's shopping! =)

In other other news, I'm just now getting over a major bronchitis--courtesy of little Allen, who got sick from playing with little Andrew, who picked it up who knows where. Isn't sharing nice?

In the third other news, here's a recent layout that's full of peace, which I sorely needed this weekend (everything's mine, except for the button from Vinnie Pearce's Freebie Thank You Kit; fonts Distro Light & Father Nelson):



Journaling reads:

sometimes this is life


the shore we are crossing to
is shrouded in fog
and the goal is yet up another
steep cliff
and even the path there
is slippery and wet
and mostly just cobbled together
and you’ll really have to
pay attention


if you don’t want the icy shock
of reality to soak through your shoes


but also


don’t forget to stop
and let the mist bless your hair
with its tiny moist sparkles
and marvel at how the beauty
flows together so well
and realize that you’re standing
right in the middle of it all

Interesting that I feel able to complement my poetry through this medium; in general I dislike movies made from books, for example, as I always feel my imagination is capable of generating far more intense visuals than film. In the case of poetry, however--as wide open as it can be to different interpretations--the photographs, as well as the specific choice of elements to accompany them, contribute towards a guided reading that more intimately suits my needs; the need to be understood, the need for empathy, the need for resonance.

Ok, ok, I'll stop with the high-falutin' analysis already. ;) Hope everybody's having a great weekend!

Flourished (Full Kit) & A Kit Freebie

Whee! My first full kit... inspired by my peacock! *lol* I'm probably the only person dorky enough to be inspired by myself... =)

So without further ado, I present to you: Flourished Full Kit, in the Ooh la la, Artsy! Shop! If you don't want the whole thing you can buy the Element Pack, too.



And, there's a freebie to go with it, which you *can't* get in the kit: a set of 4 gold photo corners--something special to set off your beautiful images! Just click on the preview to download.

New Stamp Plate: Japanese Gardens 4

Here's a little preview of the new stamp sheet (at Art Neko by the beginning of next week?):



And heck, I might as well try my hand at a Japanese-themed mini-kit as well! So here's the first paper I've come up with (I'm tentatively calling the mini-kit "Asian Mists"):

Working with Dark and Some Other Stuff

Just a quickie to share some layouts: It's been interesting for me to work with very dark colors in a couple of recent layouts. Interesting, because I've discovered that it's quite possible to have a lot of richness despite the fact that you can't see a whole lot...

Here's the one that started it off:



And then the companion layout:



Can I mention in passing just how wonderful I think Lynn Grieveson's Kiwiana Paper Pack is? I have used these more times than I can remember--some just as they are, others with hue changes, or as overlays. They're soooooo rich! Anyway, a completely *unaltered* (yes, you may all gasp in unison now ;) background turned out to be just awesome for this really cute picture of Allen I found. After cropping the photo, I found that it just blended in with the paper so well that it's hard to distiguish it from a roof on the top edge (which is why I chose to use that striped brush up there, partly). The Goat page also has one of her papers--again, unaltered, and it just fit so well! My advice is... just buy what your gut tells you, not what you think you might be likely to use... ;)

And an unrelated layout that actually took me quite a while, and started out in tones of purple:



And can you believe that this uses Lynn's bright blue paper from that pack as its base? Hehehe. Oh, and the pattern on the left is from a *black* paper by Katie Pertiet. Play, play, play and experiment--it's amazing what you can find!

Trying My Hand

Well, it's no big secret that I am pecuniously challenged, so I keep on hoping that if I work really hard and gain lots of skills, I'll get lucky and land a designing job where I can work from home and continue to homeschool Allen (yesterday he learned Roman numerals, and practiced counting with coins--fun!). It just so happens that I'm fortunate enough to practice by scrapbooking! *lol* I think I'm juuuuust beginning to get to the stage where I know enough to realize how much I don't know...

So, a couple of layouts with stuff I made:

A variegated polka dot paper pattern. That was way fun. And then making little dots with my frame, and inside an alpha I made up (the ONE thing I don't like about Designer Digital's site is that everything has to be so small! 500x500 at less than 100 Kb just eats all the detail. *sniff*). You can see it a little better here:



Although even there you can't see the little dots in the letters--just imagine they're all like the "4"! And the interlocking circle tag thing also has "holes" running around the edge. The paper overlapping the green rectangles was also one that I made--I actually recolored the polka dot paper for this layout. Plus I made kind of a patchwork quilt paper with white lines running through the various colors going in different directions, but I ended up not using it. So, that's almost like a full kit!

I also really like what happened with this layout:



The stained glass effect was pretty easy after all (I'd had these nightmare visions of dodging and burning each square): I just used the background for one of the cards I'd made earlier this year. I desaturated it, duplicated it, turned one of the duplicates at a 90 degree angle, and set one to color burn, and the other to linear dodge. Terrific effect, I think! My little crow is from a walk a couple of weeks ago, and the tree I first drew free-hand, then redrew it in Illustrator.

The picture is from a walk we took this past weekend down near Coos Bay--just WAIT till you see the phenomenal pictures I took--and then my battery ran out. ARGH! My husband wondered if I could even take a walk without a camera in hand anymore... =)How'd I get so hooked?!?

In the age of speed...

...it's so easy to become frustrated over the funniest stuff. Like tonight, when both 2Peas AND Digishoptalk are down at the same time. Yeesh, and me with a new layout to post! Fine, I'll post it here then... =)

A touch of melancholy, again. Allen and I had a wonderful hour or so at Ona Beach Park, between Seal Rock and Newport. Here's a picture of him running on the sand--we were playing catch the shadow. Look at the golden glow around his hair! I know you're not "supposed" to shoot into the light, but it really gives some cool effects--this photo was hardly retouched at all (I just took out a few distracting bright spots from shells on the beach).

Fonts: Footlight MT Light & Playwright (err, I didn't mean for them to rhyme!). Shell image is my design for a stamp at Art Neko. Journaling reads: "I just hope that these fleeting bursts of ecstasy will somehow be inscribed on your psyche, and accompany you throughout your life to draw on in darker moments."



It's not anything spectacular, but I did work with the paper a bit (the bottom layer is a scan of gold momigami).

Happy Moments

Well... I'm kinda pleased with this one! Why did it work? I think partly it was because I followed (more or less) a successful scrap to begin with, and partly because I used other peoples' stuff. Guess that's another area I need to work on...

Back to Paper

Ok, well if I'm bad at something, I need to practice, so here I go! I was cruising through the Designer Digitals fora today (for some reason--HOF 2008?--the forum at 2Peas has been really dead lately, and I'm looking for inspiration), and found a link with a cool challenge to ideabooks4u.com. The challenge was about tying your photo to your journaling by using colorblocking (or at least, that's how I read it). They used an inspiration by Jessica Sprague, I think, in one of her books, that was indeed very pretty.

So here's mine for that:

(Font: Rosemary Modern.)

Took me forever, as usual... I like it ok, but it's not super. The background is pretty cool, and I think the journaling block works ok, especially after I put that third blue one in the middle, but it's lacking... je ne sais quoi. Annoying to not be able to pinpoint it! =) The brushes were fun, though.

So, from there I flitted to Designer Digital's main blog, Designer Details. There, I found a Saturday Scraplift that I think is still current, about patterned paper. Perfect! I've been cruising through galleries taking notes on what I like about people's use of paper. This is a scraplift, so there's a certain format, and that will help me get a start on trying to CONQUER PAPER *said in tones of triumph, but with a certain tinge of stark terror* ...

Wherein Our Heroine Has A Bad Hair Day

So, I worked crazy hours on this ridiculous layout today--enough that I felt guilty for not being more with Allen, so I did penance by deep-cleaning the bathroom. Heh. Anyways. I really like these papers, separately. I think I did an ok job on the ribbon, although it's incredibly flat still. The frame is a little ridiculous and over the top, but it was kinda meant to be. I *really* like the embroidery piece, though I think I fiddled with it too much here--I'm glad I still have the original. And the photo, of course, is cute. But all together? Meh, at best--and really pretty bleh. *sigh* Here it is:



I don't know why I can do fine with layering paper on cards, but just can't seem to get the hang of making something decent with papers when digiscrapping...

So, back to the Nature photos, I think. ;) We got some really good ones today--beautiful sun and cold, clean air, and a lovely sunset. Hope you had a good day!