Freebie: Flourished Love (+ Alpha in the shop!)

I developed this font when I first got my Font Creator software, and I'm only now getting around to doing something with it. Better late than never! Anyway, the alpha was for sale in the store:



And here's a much smaller version of the word art that I'm offering as a freebie: [no longer available, sorry]

Au Naturel, and Dodging and Burning

I think the pressure of the contest has been getting to me! Now that I have a couple days' respite, my layout designing is flowing again...

Promised you some gorgeous pictures from our explorations the other day, and here they are! Allen and I went to swim together on Sunday up in Newport, and then since it was so gorgeous and a bonus sun day (the weather forecast had predicted rain), we decided to explore a little. I'd seen this lighthouse in the distance from our forays on Nye Beach, and we went looking for it. Sure am glad we found it! Oh, and YaQUINa is pronounced like "quintuple"--old First People name. Fonts: Penguin and Bernhard Modern Standard. Journaling reads: "Just you and I, exploring on a glorious sunny day. We met Clement the Keeper, climbed 120 stairs, gazed at the amazing lighting mechanism, and read about rendered pig oil, which they used to store in 800 gallon tanks. Poor pigs. Now, they use electricity. The land is amazing -- ancient lava flow from 500 miles away!"



And this second one is another in my All Designer Digitals series (heh)-- do click on the image to find all the credits:



I think I'm finally getting the hang of this patterned paper thing! And I'm really pleased with the way that word art came out -- even the "saying" is mine! *lol* I'm not sure how it can really be a saying or a quote if I made it up, but oh well... =)

I submitted this for the dodging and burning challenge this week @ 2Peas, also. The original photo was fine, but nothing special. So I changed it into black and white, but the the contrast was terrible: the grass in the background was the same color as his jacket, and the right side of his body was disappearing into the pier. So I dodged the heck out of it. Still wasn't peppy enough, so then I thought maybe I could make it pop by duplicating and setting the top one to screen, but that didn't do a thing. So.... (long story short): put a lighting effect on it to highlight the contrast, changed both of them to brown, set the top one to color burn, then additionally, burned the areas in the upper left corner and on his hand and arm where the details were completely washed out. Turned out kinda funky, I think! I used the color burn on almost everything--I love how it grunges up the color all by itself.

Invis ble To The Eye

Is it indicative of our increasingly electronic culture that no one commented on the missing i? I kinda was playing a joke in the layout, substituting the frame of the sliding door for the "i" in "invisible", and rearranging Andrea Victoria's quote to align "eye" right beneath.

There's more of a subtext, too, in that I was really depressed in that house, and in fact, during that first Christmas after Allen was born, suffering from heavy post-partum depression, which everybody had failed to diagnose yet. So my "I" was pretty much gone as well, even though what I journalled is true; and I truly did feel invisible, having been thrust from a highly professional teaching career into stay-at-home mother. It's amazing the difference in how people treat you when you're just a mom--despite the protestations that it's "quite a job."


(As usual, click on the photo to see a larger version and read credits)

Spring Awakens

Just goofin' around today and trying to use 2Peas stuff for the kit challenge (ended up using Shannon Freeman's Back To School kit, though you'd never be able to tell), and also as an excuse for developing some rubber stamping word art. So this will be a stamp on the next plate... They're my own words, so that's why no attribution. =)