Fire Within: Burning Passion!

Oh my gosh... got a surprise Gelli plate in the mail from a friend, and had the best time playing! I made a kit out of it called Fire Within, to celebrate our passions and those feelings that make us unique...




I hand-drew an alpha, too--it comes with all kinds of cool little symbols:





The CT made some mind-blowing layouts--wow!

By Ona:


By Margje:


By Ulla-May:


By Jo-Anne:


By Gen:


By Sandrine (recolored):


And by Sarah Whithers:


Hope you guys have a fabulous weekend playing!

Commercial/Personal Grunge Brushes, & Off-Kilter Dates!

I thought I'd be designed-out for a while, but look what popped out! The CU/PU Brushes 5: Grunge are a set of 27 (!) brushes in .abr and .png files. Grunge brushes are so great for making papers, photomasks, distressed anythings... And as a scrapper, you can use them to fade your photos, or add interest behind a photo or element on your layout. I love grunge brushes! (These were all made from photos I took of things. Guess my habit of standing nose to wall or nose to floor is paying off! *giggles*)

Astrid made this really cool page with the Hi Energy kit and the Grunge Brushes:

And also out popped some funky typography in date form, with three versions: totally grunged, slightly grunged and offset 3D edge, and just slightly grunged. The three versions have 0-9, days of the week, and month names. Here are the Off-Kilter: Dates:

I have several layouts for these:

By Astrid, with Precious:

By Vera, with Small Things:

And by Jetje, with Wishes Come True:

Both products are of course 20% off through this Sunday. I hope you guys have a wonderful weekend!

Lived In: Masks & Scribbles 1

I have some great new products out for you today--some grungy, paint-edged masks, and some lovely grunged up scribbles. Perfect for adding texture and depth to your layouts!

Lived In: Masks 1:

Lived In: Scribbles 1

Here are some CT images:

By Romy:

By Jen:

And one of mine:

Hope everybody has a great weekend!

Grunge Brushes - Set 03 @ MScraps!

Some awesome brushes this week -- CU ok!

A couple of layouts from the crew:

By Lisa (when I first looked at this, I thought she hadn't used any of my stuff--but it's just because it looks so changed with all the brushwork. COOL!):

Double page by Zara:

By Vera:

By Julie:

By Sonia:

We watched The Yellow Submarine (by the Beatles) last night. GROOVY typography! And our little cat Lily is getting an endoscopy and biopsy of the duodenum today, poor sweetie. She has pancreatitis, and we're trying to figure out the best way to help her...

 

Hope you guys have a wonderful weekend!!

Hey! It's Tuesday!

So that means it's Tickle Your Tuesday over @ MScraps, and I have my Out of Line: Borders on sale for 50% off, which means they're dirt cheap. These are some very cool, very grungy elements--perfect for adding just a special touch.

In fact, I used these just recently on a page I made for the MScraps Ad challenge (the little hearts border):

So drop on by!

More on Combining Efforts

The place where it all began was on OSA, Oriental Stamping Art. Side note: I found out about OSA because of my friend Brenda Marks, who's branched off from stamping into her own stuff, which you can admire at http://www.brendamarks.com/ (I'm particularly enjoying her embossed pastels right now). Anyway, Asian art has always been a fascination of mine, and stamping in a westernized Asian style has fit me to a "T" (bad pun alert, sorry... ;). Now that I've started delving into digiscrapping I'm exploring a more Western style--my family and I are unfortunately way too white to fit, photographically, with a lot of Asian-style layouts (though I do try and sneak it in, of course! *lol*).

But (I was going somewhere with all this, I promise), I can combine techniques, and reuse what I make for stamping with what I do in digiscrapping. Who knows--eventually maybe I'll be able to make stuff commercially, too! In this case, I'm referring to this card, which I made for the OSA ACE9 round for January (ACE=Asian Card Exchange; you send 3 cards a month rotating down a list until you get back to your own name):

(Pine Bough by Stampendous, Winter kanji by Art Neko, punched branch by McGill)

The background is a piece of 8.5" x 8.5" white column cardstock that I distressed with sanding paper, an embroidery needle, and the sharp point of my X-acto knife, then covered with blue dye ink and silver pigment ink. I added the darker inked edges after I cut up the paper (I made 4 cards of this style), but I'll have to do another like it--love the effect, and it would work great for a photo frame in digiscrapping. I scanned the larger square piece. Now (with a bit of fiddling in the contrast area) I have a great grunged overlay that I can use!

I can foresee a lot more of these stamping/digiscrapping combos coming down the line... ;)

Musings on Grunge

Grunge is SO not my usual style. Yet in digital scrapbooking I've been doing a lot of it for some reason. I think coming to 2Peas and being exposed to so many new styles has been a big part of it--and I've also fallen head, hook, and sinker (or however that expression goes--did you know I'm from Switzerland, originally?) for Rhonna Farrer's swooshes, flourishes, and style in general. I think the reason grunge works more for me in digiscrapping than it does with my cardwork is that -- for me at least -- scrapping is much more about telling a story, whereas a card is more like a snapshot. Grunge is ultimately very emotional and allows many nuances--and is also much more forgiving when you make a mistake. =)

I've also been reading a really useful book that I'd completely forgotten existed in my library, the Photoshop 7.0 Wow! book. In my "So Fleeting" layout that I worked on today I experimented a lot with layer masks, especially using gradients to help mask a layer gradually. You can see this at work with the sunset photo, and also, faintly, with the little yellow clock faces on the left bottom (that clock image, which I promptly made into a brush of course, was taken in City Hall in San Francisco. It's amazing what things you can find in old photos to make into brushes!). The gradients work really well with the whole grunge feel, and they do it much more smoothly than I ever could with just a dodge or eraser brush...

Anyway, here it is. I was in a melancholy mood for some reason today. Fonts: Selfish and Dauphin.