PaperPlay - BIG WINK ;-)

Here's my entry for this week's PaperPlay Challenge. The theme was "Buttons Galore" - apart from the red & green buttons, I tried to make buttons out of the photos, but I don't think it worked, could you guess they were buttons?

I am trying to have a layout done for each month of the year, so far I've done January and February - hoping to finish another one during the weekend.



The paint is not paint - they're digital brushes which I got in Deviant Art: Coffee Stains by Divinity-bliss and Splash Brushes by Mokashine. Which I also used in this layout but forgot to credit.

And wink wink, keep on checking the PaperPlay blog, the boss said there's a big surprise coming!!!!

Questions and crafts

I wanted to combine this photo and one of my daughter's off-the-wall questions since Crafteire, but I got stuck, didn't like it and never finished it. Now I converted the photo to black&white, added a couple of her philosophical musings and made a simple, graphical layout. Like this one better.



I blogged about these flowers before. The papers had already started to fade so I decide to dismantle the flowers and keep them in a scrapbook page.



The frame and ribbon combination was copied from a layout by Davinie Fiero in Scrapbook Trends.

Curves...

This post is dedicated to Lainey, who is a fabulous photographer and just started using the curves tool.

Do you know these beautiful photo effects that you can get using actions? Like getting a modern, greenish tinge or a faded rosy look?

The good news is that you don't need actions.
The bad news is that PSE is not good enough, you need (the very expensive) Photoshop. Or the (quite cheap) PSP a.k.a. PaintShop Pro. Or (the free) GIMP.

You can find about everything in the web, the only thing you need is to find the right words feed Google. Since it took me a while, I'll save you the bother and give you the links straight away:

SOOC (original photo, straight out of the camera)



Cross processing simulation:



Another one:


And the faded, vintage look:




Both tutorials are for Photoshop, but just find the curves tool and you can easily repeat the steps in PSP.

Start with the faded vintage, which is the quickest one to get the hang of it.
I only discovered how to do this today and am in love with it, expect lots of vintage looking photos in my scrapbook layouts from now on. :-)

This is how to get the look for the first photo. It gives great results for both b&w and colour photos.

I can't find the tutorial on how to repeat the 2nd photo, but it is similar to the one above. The red and green channels should look the same, but the blue one should look like an inverted "S".

Hot ATC and messy LO

HOT HOT HOT was the theme for this week's PaperPlay Challenge.



We had to use orange, yellow and reds. Made this ATC, partly to entice Julie to part with one of her Gorguss ATCs, is it working, Julie!?!!! LOL

Got another LO done, using the Garment District kit from Studio Calico. Something in this kit, specially makes me want to go against type, making a handwritten title, wonky stitching and even the using the proof version of the journaling.

It is about a secret dream as well as an admission to my oh so obvious clumsy side.

I never had a ballgown, a beautiful, frivolous long dress and I so wish I could have one now.

All right, pretty rich coming from me, who rejected my only legitimate opportunity to wear a long dress - my wedding day. I was wrong, OK? The knee length dress was a fashion mistake, to say the least.

Back to my dress. I didn’t realise I had a yearning for one until I went shopping the other day. I saw this beautiful burnt orange, diafanous dress and fell in love with it. Orange is definitely not a colour I can wear, but in my dream, I would be beautiful, tanned, taller (extra height going to my legs), slimmer and 21 years old.

I would be stepping out of a chauffer driven card, going to a party, or a ceremony, maybe the Oscar award ceremony.

I’ll be stunning in my dress, high heeled sandals, with my black, lustrous hair up, diamond earrings and a suitable escort. If my gorgeous husband were unavailable, anyone would do, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, honest, anyone.

The sad thing is, in a ball, I wouldn’t be dancing, or in an award ceremony, I wouldn’t be collecting any myself.

Because I can dream myself taller, younger and beautiful. But even in my dreams I am the one who would step on my partner’s shoes, or would trip over my dress on my way to get my award.


The photo was taken by Eva Birdthistle at the lastest (and sadly last) Crafteire.

Black and White, Digi and Trad,...

... boy and girl.

Looking at my two latest layouts, I realised that they're opposites in terms of cardstock colour, techniques and subject.



No paint spilt on the making of the above project. It's all digital!
Digital brushes found in deviant art.
Runny paint splatter: Splash Bby mokashine
Others: Coffee Stains by Divinity bliss



Patterned papers, brads and alphas from Studio Calico kit.

Totally non digital on this one, if you discount the photo - I played a little bit with it.

Paper flowers

Yesterday was Mother's Day in Brazil (2nd Sunday of May), so can I show you what I got from my son for the Irish Mother's Day back in March?



He made it in the playgroup and I thought the flowers (tulips or lillies?) were very cute and was of course delighted with them. But it took a long while before I realised that each flower is actually a little hand shape - my son's - wrapped around a drinking straw. What about you, did you guess???!!!

I am a little bit obsessed with making paper flowers at the moment, since I saw these ones in the Studio Calico blog.




And, ah, yes, I have another blog, The Reluctant Cardmaker, I just started a few minutes ago, it is still very much naked but please take a look if you have some time.

What do you do with a digital layout?

This gotta be the most asked question to a digital scrapper. I started my "scrapbooking life" doing digital layouts. But only after few months, I started buying scrapbooking papers and was never he same again.

But back to the question. The reply is "whatever you want". I used to print mine. I designed A4 pages and printed them.

I haven't done a pure digital for ages now, but most of my layouts have a digital component, sometimes only the title or journaling, but often I design the whole layout in PSE. That is, I sketch in the computer instead of using paper and pencil.

Like this one:



My idea was to use a rubbon on the top of the blue paper, but the dingbat worked so well that I decided to reproduce the whole layout in paper as it was, so I:

- printed the photo.
- printed the journaling and dingbat in a cardstock with a similar shade of blue
- got a dark brown cardstock and put all the elements together.

What you're seeing is the digital version. It is a digital layout, a very simple one. The paper one it what you'd call hybrid, but only just.

By the way, the layout is about my mini techno-geek of a son. :-)
TFL

PaperPlay Day and a NSD "left-over"

Today the PaperPlay challenge is up, the theme was set by Jackie:

The challenge is to use Wings on your project, Birds, butterflies, fairies whatever you like as long as it has wings.

If you're wondering why my entries often are in these white frames, it is because I bought a few of them in M&S when they were on sale. This is the last one, I don't know what I'll be doing next week without them :-(. The silhouete is of my son. The wings were from Heidi Swapp, they are called invisisible chipboard - they come blank and when you colour them some bits resist the ink so you get a pattern without any effort. Perfect for the lazy crafters like me.



The two little photos below were initially meant to go with the layout in the previous post, but I liked so much the striking contrast between the colourful photos and the muted frames that I decided that they deserved a layout on their own. I only had to find something to say, but what? since it was such an ordinary day...

Did you have a happy NSD?

Mine was great, not much scrapping, but we went to celebrate my birthday, which was Monday. Still got home on time to take a pic of this layout, to enter Tina Cockburn's challenge for NSC in Studio Calico. The theme was white space.

The background is turned out a bit too dirty looking for my taste, but at least I have my Feb/09 compilation LO done. I had the intention of doing one for each month so that each month gets recorded, even if I don't scrap every event in the month, but this is actually the first one I made this year (I skipped January).