Scrap n' Art Blog!

Come check out my first post on the Scrap N' Art Blog and be sure to keep visiting for more and more great tips and ideas!

My Little Beauty

credits: Pink Paradise by PtiteSouris (Digital Crea); Perfect Journaling by Ange (Digital Crea); editing done with PSE6

What a little diva, right?!? For the past couple weeks, the only thing this girl wants to wear is her princess outfits... and she wears them everywhere, including outdoors to go play which is why she has her glasses on here, she just cracks me up!

How I created the reflection: Obviously, the first thing I did was extract my image. Next, I duplicated the image and flipped it vertically. I then 'transformed' the flipped image by holding down the CTRL key, clicking on the lower left corner and dragging it to the left. Finally, I blended the flipped photo onto the background. In this case, I actually used two layers for the blending. I first used overlay which I liked but because I had such a light background, it was a little difficult to see. So I made a second layer of the image on top of that, left it normal and reduced the opacity to 10%. As I always say, blending takes a lot of trial and error in every project and it may not work for you the same way it worked for me!

This Moment

credits: Doux Moment by Sange (Digital Crea); Playing with Word Art Vol 2 by Natali Designs (Scrapbook Graphics); edited with PSE6

I feel like I haven't made a page in forever! I've been busy getting ready to move into our new house but I defintely needed a break today!

This is a picture of me helping Isabella feed Angelina a bottle, which Isabella very much wanted to do during our Fourth of July outing! I wanted to keep the page simple and let the photo do most of the talking. While the layout is simple, there was a lot of editing done on the photo, something nobody ever realizes until you show them the original! So, see below...

As you can now see, I removed Brad from the background. It's not that I don't love him or anything but he just wasn't part of the moment I was trying to capture! I used the clone stamp tool in PSE to create grass in place of him. I then used the spot healing brush to go over areas that looked obviously duplicated from using the previous tool. I then also blurred the background with the blur tool to bring all the focus to us in the foreground, it was rather busy in the background with all those trees. I also upped the brightness and contrast after turning the photo to b&w. My favorite part of this photo is that if you look close enough, you can see Angelina reflected in my glasses, which is the only reason I didn't crop myself out!

The Birthday Girl!

credits: An Oscraps special offer kit by Sue Cummings; ribbon from Magic Birthday a collab kit between Dydyge, Loloden and Seni (Digital Crea); edited with PSE6

Poor Luna, I always forget her birthday is in June too (Isabella is the only outcast in this family to NOT have a June birthday!) until her annual birthday card from Petco arrives. That day was today and as I opened it up, I saw the hats from Gavin's birthday still sitting on the counter. I couldn't resist, I don't think Luna was too amused by it though!

Luna really is wearing the hat in the photo - to create the OOB effect (Out-of-Bounds), I made two copies of the photo and cropped one to fit the frame while extracting just the hat out of the second.

Below is the same page with a thought bubble added. I wanted to make the page a little more humorous for a funny cats challenge at SBF!

Four Generations

credits: Concentre de douceur by Sev (Digital Crea); "love" from Playing with Word Art Vol 2 by Natali Designs (Scrapbook Graphics); editing done with PSE6

So in a recent post, I had expressed how anxious I was to have a new 4 generations picture taken and here it is!!! I'm so happy about this, YAY! This is my grandmother, my mother, myself and my daughter taken on May 30th at a baby shower for my cousin. Don't be too easily fooled by Isabella's little innocent smile however. She is going through another 'don't take my picture' phase right now and so the original shot looked like this:

Don't ask me what steps I actually took to give Isabella her new face because I did a lot of different things until I thought it finally looked believable! I do know I started by cropping and placing her head from another picture on a layer above this one. Next, I reduced the opacity and lined up her facial features. I put the opacity back to 100 and began using the soft eraser to remove everything I didn't need. The second photo's lighting was slightly different so I know I adjusted that as well. When I finally felt I was finished, I merged my two layers together and had my new perfect generations photo!

Angelina's Baby Eyes

credits: Baby's Dream by Mlle Heloise (Digital Crea); Playing with Word Art vol8 by Natali Designs (Scrapbook Graphics); editing done with PSE6

Below is the original picture I used on this page. I wanted the focus to be on Angelia's beautiful eyes, which I felt lucky to catch on camera, so I turned the photo to b&w and turned up both the brightness and contrast all the way (150 for brightness/100 for contrast). To make her eyes stand just a little more, I extracted them from the photo in color, turned the opacity to 25% and upped the saturation just a little.

My Boy

credits: Welcome to Dream Land by Redju & Thaliris (Digital Crea - layout based on a page by the CT for this kit); editing done with PSE6

In all honesty, the simplicity of this page was based more on the fact that it was 1 AM than anything else! I was looking at some of the CT samples for this kit, saw this layout and thought hey, that will be quick and easy! And that it was, I'm still very happy with it even if it was more of a - I just want to be able to say I finished something tonight - things! I did a little editing to the photo itself as well. First, I added a white vignette by going to filter and then correct gamma distortion. Second, I duplicated the photo, made the top layer yellow and gave it 25% opacity which I thought helped it match the page's colors. I also thought doing both these things worked with the idea that a yellow lamp was shining down on the photo, I hope you agree! :)

Love You Forever

Credits: Little Treasure by Bisontine (Mar 09 edition of DAM); editing done with PSE6

I wanted to go back and scrap some older pics of Brad with the kids and this one of him and Isabella was taken on May 25, 2006. At the time, I had taken the picture to put on a mug for his first Father's Day gift! I'm very happy with this page... I love this kit so much, it is just too sweet!

To blend the photo in the bg I used the soft eraser tool to get rid of everything in the pic except what I wanted, their faces. I then used two layers of the photo, the top layer is the screen blending option set at 75% opacity and the bottom layer is soft light blending option also at 75% opacity.

My Little X-tra Cutie!

Credits: So Sweet and Precious by dydyge (Digital Crea); editing done with PSE6

I just saw the photo in text idea today while looking at the May edition of Digital Artist Magazine. Then I remembered the letter 'x' challenge currently going on at SBF and this was the result!

If you want to try to out, just place your photo on top of the text and then with the photo layer selected press CTRL+G or you can place your cursor between the two layers, press ALT and click. Whichever way you prefer, they both give you the same result... and you're done, unless you want to merge the layers and move them somewhere else. I also added paper to the letter the same way behind my photo then played around with blending. I ended up blended my photo twice, the uppermost layer is the screen blending option and the next layer down is the luminosity blending option. The luminosity option made the photo the color of the paper while the screen option lightened it. It always takes me a lot of experimentation until I find the right combination of blended layers to achieve a look I like. The same combination may not look the same with a different photo and/or different background. And that's all for now... I hope you learned something today! :)

My First Freebie: Shoot for the Moon Word Art

CLICK IMAGE TO DOWNLOAD

credits: Danielle's Designs - quote by Les Brown; Nueva Std & BlackJack fonts; created with PSE6

My Layout

credits: Fly My Baby to the Moon by Coralie (Digital Crea); Word Art by Danielle's Designs; editing done with PSE6

This photo was taken of Isabella on 9/4/06. The extraction was a little difficult because in the original photo (posted below) she was sitting in grass, reaching out for a leaf. I used a combination of the clone stamp tool and the spot healing brush tool in PSE6 to remove the grass and leaf. I used the clouds as well to help cover up the grass in some places. As you can see the top of her head also had to be completed and I used the same two tools for that.