I thought I would do something a little different tonight, take a look at the digital scrapbook page I created for my father as a gift. I will be walking you through the steps to create a page just like this one.

I begin by opening the photo that I want to use and making a duplicate layer.  Select the original layer and right click your photo effects icon which is located on the right hand side of your workspace; it is a small blue rectangle right next to the double retangle immediately under the word Effects. Go to the drop down menu and select Old Photo>Old Photo and click apply. You will not see a change because this layer is under the duplicate layer.

Next , click the small square next to the close button for the document to expand the workspace. Go to select and choose Select All from the drop down menu. This will outline the photo in marching ants and small boxes at each corner. Choose a corner and hover your pointer over it, once you see a double end arrow right click and drag your edge toward the opposite corner. This will resize your photo without distorting the proportions. Make it as small as you would like and then make to dupicate layers.

Arrange the photos by twisting them and layering them as I did in the picture above. It does not have to look exactly like mine play until you get the look you want. Now you can go a step further than I did and give each picture layer a different style effect to give a unique look.

Next came the paper clip, you want to drag it onto the page and make sure you have the top photo selected so it ends up as the uppermost layer. Arrange the paper clip over the picture so that the center part is slightly hanging off the corners of the photos. Now to make it appear as if it is trully clipped to the photos you will need to erase parts of it. Select your magnifying glass and click your page a few times unitl you can see the paper clip and the edges of the photos clearly. Choose your eraser and change its size and slowly erase the parts of the clip as below.

As with any form of artistic express sometimes you just do not “feel” the inspiration bug. If you find ourself staring at a blank screen frustrated because you can not figure out what to create next turn your attentions back to scrapping your memories. Staring at a blank screen racking your mind to come up with a new and fresh idea is not condusive to creativity.

When I get to the point that it is more frustrations than creative ideas I like to pull out my box of pictures. I sift through them until something trully reaches out and grabs my attention. I turn to my printed picures during this time because they take me to memories that are not viewed on a daily basis. I see my digital pictures everyday, I use them more often in online scrapbook communities and to give examples of my work by creating quick pages and layouts that showcase my kits. More often than not I am hit with a eureka moment that jumpstarts my creative juices again, usually in regards to a digital scrapbook theme or color schemes. At other times I just pull out my digital camera and just have fun photographing my favorite subjects, my six children.

I leave you with a promise of more tutorials tomorrow and as always; kiss your babies.

We will be using the Extract filter to extract a subject from the background so you can rid distracting backgrounds from an otherwise perfect photo. Open the photo you will be editing and make a copy of the image by going to your layer pallette and right click and drag it onto your new layer icon. Click Filters on your tool bar and slide down to Extract and select it. This will pull your image up on a new screen the tool pallete is located on the left hand side of this screen. Choose the highlighter tool and draw a small line around your subject that slightly overlaps the background.

Once you have completely outlined the portion you wish to keep select the Fill tool and click inside your selection.This will cover the area that Photoshop will keep with a translucent color, once you fill click on Preview and you will be taken to a new screen that will allow you to clean up the edges of the extraction.

On the left hand side you will find the clean-up and touch-up tools. The clean-up works alot like the eraser tool by getting rid of the stray particles left behind while the touch-up tool will smooth the edges and replace particles that were removed that were part of the subject. Once the extraction is to your satisfaction click Okay and you will be taken back to the editing area of Photoshop were you can place it on another background or apply stlyes anf filters to it.

If you wish to work with it later just save as a .png file and it will remain its transparency for future editing. Hope that may help someone, kiss you babies!

I told you when I posted the tutorial on how to create a blinkie in Photoshop Elements 6 that I would walk you through how to post them online. Well it took me some time to work all the bugs out of it and trully get a grasp of what i had done(how quickly one forgets the steps when you are just amazed you accidently got it right).

First of all you need to upload your saved blinkie to a site like Photobucket to get its unique html code. You will be using the html code only for this so just ignore the other links listed. I suggest opening wordpad or notepad document so that you can copy and paste all th info your going to need in one place.

 You will need the part of the code that starts with http: and ends with .gif from the html code that you copied from Photobucket. Now you will also need the url for the site you are wanting the blinkie to link to(I link mine directly to my main page of my Blog).

Now once you have both of those copied onto your wordpad document copy and paste this html code:

<center><a href=”YOUR URL“><img alt=”" width=”150” src=”YOUR BLINKIE HTML CODE” height=”50“/></a><center></center></center>

Today we will make a textured tag in Photoshop Elements 6 using the custom shape tool.

First open a new 4 by 4. Choose your desired color from the color pallette and click the custom shape tool, it is a blue heart toward the bottom of your tool pallette. From the selection area click on the small double arrow off to the right of the thumbnail pictures of the shapes. Go to “ALL Elements Shapes” and click. This will bring the thumbnails of all the custom shapes you have available to you. Scroll down the list until you find the rounded square tool and select it.

Go to your workspace and create a tall rectangle, this will be the bottom of your tag. Go back to the shape’s list and select the hexagon(stopsign) shape. Go back to your workspace and create a hexagon aproxamately the same width as your rectangle. Do not worry about it being perfect because you can always resize it to match. You want to line up the two shapes so that it appears to be a seamless tag. Once it is lined up go over to your layer workspace and right click each layer and simplify them. Once they are simplified right click and merge the layers.

Now go to your tool pallette and select the eliptical marque tool, select-left click on your workspace to create the hole for the tag. If it is not even just hover the mouse over the selected area until you see a pointer and drag the circle to your desired position. Once you are satisfied with its placement go to Edit and select Cut to remove the color from the selected area.

Next we add the texture to the tag by going to Filters>Render>Fiber, when the screen pops up you want the variance level to be 37 and the strength level to be 4. Once this has applied duplicate your layer; making sure your duplicate layer is selected go to your styles menu. Choose Wow-Neon from the dropdown menu, choose one that matches the color you used for the tag. Experiment with them until you find one that you like. After the style has been applied go to your layer pallette change the opacity level of the duplicate later to 59% and merge both layers.

Create a duplicate layer once again and go to the Wow-Chrome in your styles dropdown menu and select the Wow-Chrome Textured thumbnail and click apply. Now change the opacity of this layer until you are satisfied with the way the tag looks. Merge the layers and save as a .png file to maintain transparency. Remember you are in control of the final results, play around with the opacity layers or levels of filters and styles until you find the perfect result for you.

Congratulations on making a textured tag, goodnight and kiss your babies.

First you will need this font, Butterfly Haven by Perry Mason. Once you have downloaded and installed this font (for instructions on how to do this please refer to my prior post titled FONTS) open your Photoshop Elements 6  program and select a new file at 1200 by 1200 pixels or 4 by 4 in with a transparent backgound.

Choose your type tool and type a capital C on your document, pretty butterfly huh. Once you have done that go over to your styles and choose glass buttons from the drop down menu. Select whatever color button you wish your butterfly to be, I have chosen light purple. Now make a duplicate layer and choose bevels in your styles dropdown menu. I am using Simple Emboss for my butterfly but try them all and find one that you like. Lower the opacity level of this layer so that the glass glow shows through the bevel, I dropped my level to 53%. Go to your layer window and shift+right click both layers, choose link layers. You do not want to merge them for this tutorial otherwise you will lose most of the glass glow.

Now we are going to add a ring so that it looks like a charm and can be hung from a bow or chain. First create another new 4 by 4 file and select your eliptical marque tool. Hold down shift key while dragging out your marque tool and you will get a perfect circle. Now we want to fill this with color, push Alt+backspace and your circle will be filled with your chosen forground color. It does not matter what color you use because once we apply a style it will appear metallic. Okay we have a circle but we want it to have a hollow center, so choose your eraser tool and change the size so that it erases most of the center of the circle. You want it to appear realistic so leave a small ring but not to small. Now we go to our styles drop down menu once again and choose Wow Chrome, I have chosen Wow Chrome-Beveled Edge.

Next step is combining the two images, first select the move tool and drag the butterfly onto the document containing the ring. Hence the reason we linked the layers earlier, if we had not we would be moving them seperately and hoping they were aligned exactly. You may need to adjust the size of the butterfly or the ring to create an realistic appearance once they are lined up together. I rotated my butterfly slightly so that it would be hanging from its wing. Once they are lined up the way you want them shift+right click your layers and merge them. You have created a hanging glass butterfly embellishment using a dingfont, pat yourself on the back and take a bow. Remeber to save as a .png file to maintain the transparency.

Goodnight and kiss your babies!

Lets talk about hybrid scrapbooking today; if you have used your computer or printer in any way to create a page you have hybrid-scrapped. Have you typed a journal out to include in a page; or maybe you printed an embellishment you found on the internet. Some create an entire digital 8.5 by 11 page print it and then mount it on a 12 by 12 page.

I like to print digital background pages on cardstock and use them as photo mats. Sometimes I print phots that I have taken of flowers or various nature scenes and print them on construction paper to mount pictures of our trips to the park. I have printed several embellishments but the drawback on that is you will probably have to cut them to get your desired effect. Journals and frames are pretty easy to work with when using scissors. I usually stay away from flower and more intricate embellishments but I make an except when it comes to Alpha’s.

Alpha’s can be expensive in craft stores and I have come across some wonderfully unique digital alpas. I have paid over six dollars in a scrapping store for a set of alpas but now I create them in Paint Shop Pro and print them for nothing but the price of the ink and photopaper I use. Alphas look so much better if you print them on photopaper rather than printing paper they tend to look more third demensional rather than flat.

I am tired and need some rest so I will leave your with; goodnight and kiss your babies.

Did you know that you can add new fonts on your computer that is carried over into your photo editing software? I thought I was stuck with some pretty lame fonts until recently, then a friend let me know that once you install them on your PC the next time your open your software they will be listed as well. I went crazy searching for new fonts and spent hours download them. Once i got the unzipped I was struck with a thought “How in the world do you install them to the computer?”

So there they sat in a folder in my documents collecting dust for weeks. While I was searching the forums of a digi-scrap community I belong to I ran across an detailed explaination that walked me through the process. SWEET! Now I have some awesome fonts to work with.

What you do is go and open up your folder that contains the fonts you have downloaded, in a seperate window open up your program files and find your file for your fonts(these are usually in your C drive). What you want to do is right click the new font files and copy them, swith over to the font folder and paste them there. It is that simple, I keep the originals just in case I need to change computers or have to do a system restore.

Having a bow in a kit is one of the first things I look for when deciding wether or not to purchase it. I have found many tutorials on how to create bows in various software programs but I just can not get the desired results in the end. I have worked my way around it by tying a bow with various ribbons at home and scanning it into my photo editing software.

Your camera and scanner can be your best friend when it comes to creating embellishments that are unique. If you can fit it on the scanner (it helps if you have a flatbed scanner, and these days you can find some great inexpensive ones) then you can create embellishments that no one else has. The possibilities are endless when you throw in your camera, just think of all the wonderful beauty that you see everyday as you drive to the store. It can all be captured and transfered into your photo editing program where the sky is the limit with what you can to do with them.

I took pictures of my garden this year and have created many beautiful flower embellishments. I have taken bits and pieces of various pictures and created layered frames with them. The plus of using a picture of an image you captured on camera is that your creations LOOK real. They have depth and texture that is difficult and time consuming to duplicate with editing software and your photography skills improve with every picture so that is an added bonus.

Goodnight and Kiss your babies.

An embellishment that is gaining popularity in the the scrapbooking community is wordart. It can be your favorite quote, a title, a defintion or phrase, proper names, journaling or pretty much any tyoe of words you want to add to bring your page to life. Wordart is a step above premade alphas in that you can have several sizes and font types to give the words an artistic feel.

What you want to do first to make your own wordart is open your photo editing sofware, I use Photoshop Elements 6 but this should translate to most software. You want to start with a new 6X6 in transparent page at 300 pixels/per inch for optimal printing quality.

I will be using the phrase “A Dollar Short and a Day Late”, yeah I am too funny right. okay, I am going to chop the sentence up to highlight the words “Dollar Short” and “Day Late. I will typ “A” on the first page, then on a new layer I will type “Dollar Short”. “and a” will be on another new layer and “Day Late will be on yet another. The reason you want to seperate the words is so that you can apply different sizes and fonts to create a dramatic effect to the phrase. Play with your fonts and word placement until you are satisfyed with the overall look. Sometimes I add flowers or other embellishments around the wordart to give it a fancier artistic look. When your completely satisfied with your work make sure that you save as a .png file to maintain the transparency of your document, otherwise you end up with a white or black background.

You will use it as an overlay for a digital scrapbook page or you can print it to cut out an place on your traditional or hybrid scrapbook pages. Well, pretty simple and I hope you have fun making them. Goodnight and kiss your babies.