In The Meantime

I finally bit the bullet and actually spent some money on scrapbooking. Well, I've paid bought a magazine subscription and a couple of issues of a Photoshop magazine that includes a CD of brushes, gradients, textures, and fonts for Photoshop. But I actually have tried to download only free kits and elements from the different websites. There are really so many free things you can get. But the really good stuff, I think you have to pay for. So, I had some extra money (I get reimbursed for my mileage when I have to go to meetings and stuff, and that's mine to do what I want with), so I decided to buy some different digital kits. I just downloaded them all, so I haven't been able to play with them yet, but I plan to this week and next week when I'm off. So hopefully, I'll post some new layouts on here soon!

In the mean time, here are a couple of pictures that I played around with on Photoshop. I will probably use them in a layout one day, but I decided to go ahead and post them here. For this picture of me and  Jason, I applied a gradient, and I played around with the opacity until I liked it.

This other picture of me is one of those where only one element in the picture is colored. I've always liked those pictures. This won't be a technical how-to, but in Photoshop, you duplicate your layer, make the new layer black & white, then create a clipping mask. You then erase the part of the picture that you want colored. Again, I'll probably scrap this one day. I originally was going to use it in the template that I used for My Love (my first layout), but I didn't want the layout to focus only on me, so I chose a picture of me and Jason.

Just an extra tidbit...here are some of my favorite scrapbooking websites: scrapgirls.com, twopeasinabucket.com, and scrapbooksetc.com. I also go to peppermintcreative.com, but I sometimes forget about that one. The things I just bought were from scrapgirls.com. That site has a daily newsletter where they give a free download. They also have what they call a scrap club, with two options, paying either $7 or $10 each month, and getting a good amount of materials in return. I'm thinking about doing that, too. So, check it out if you haven't before. And stay tuned for a new layout soon.

Easter Outtakes

I have a subscription to Scrapbooks, Etc. magazine, which I have found to be pretty inspiring for my layouts. Their website also has lots of digital downloads, like templates for collages and kits. In one of their issues, I saw a layout that had an idea for using the "outtakes" of pictures of kids that weren't usable for the project they were meant for. (Like Christmas cards or whatever). So, of course, I thought about all of these pictures that I have with me and Jason where he takes all these goofy pictures with me. I have them from a lot of different situations, but this one in particular was from Easter 2008, which also was my birthday. I remember I had sung on praise team, so I was singing the last service, and Jason had already gone to my parents' house. When I called, on my way over, he said my family had been taking pictures with the kids. When I said I wanted to take pictures, he said he had already changed. When I got there, he was persuaded to change clothes, even though he didn't really want to. So I think that's part of why we got all of these pictures. My sister, Amy, was taking them, and she kept laughing. I posted this on facebook and one of my friends was laughing that my expression was the same in all of these pictures, no matter what look Jason had. Anyway, we finally got a good one of the both of us.

This is another layout that was done before I thought to figure out how big the journaling print would look on the layouts when I do them. So I really could have fit more on there, but this is a good lesson for me to not be such a perfectionist. These papers were from the Scrapbooks, Etc. website (Graphic Pops and Cool Basics kits), and I recolored them to correlate with our pictures. The ribbons were from Mary Ann Wise's Party Hats kits, that I got on twopeasinabucket.com. I finished this layout also in February 2009.

As for a current update, I was able to work on a couple of layouts last week. One is from last Christmas, just family stuff, and the other is one from this last Halloween, since I dressed my dog in a Tigger costume. It was so cute! So, even though I'm working on blogging all of my completed layouts, hopefully I'll have new stuff up soon.