WOOWEEEEE! I'm on a design team!

I'm so excited, I'm on my first design/creative team! Shelby over at JeNaSis DeSiGn had a design team call...and she accepted me! Woohoo! I'm so pumped.

While I'm soooo new to digital scrapping, Shelby was kind enough to take me on and let me grow with her and the other team members.

Check out her blog!

Edited to add: a friend of mine asked what this means. Basically it means I am on a creative team of digital scrapbookers. We receive some product early and create layouts to showcase the great products that are going to be available. We essentially "sell" the cool stuff. :) And I just saw the first kit I get to work with for JeNaSis DeSiGn...it is sooooooooooooooo awesome! I can't wait to get started! :)

Eerrrrrrggggg

I'm in the middle of doing a blog overhaul, complete with a new background, a new header (I think) and some other new things I've grabbed for free on the wonderful thing called the world wide web.

Can someone tell me if they are seeing my header twice? One standard one and one sooped up one that is all purty? Also, is the purty header not really centered, but kind of off to one side? ugh. Total frustration. I had someone design that header a few years ago, when I started this blog. But now its not anywhere near the color scheme that I want for the blog, and its slightly irritating me. I am OCD about matchy-matchy. Yep, I'm one of THOSE bloggers. Sadly, I'm also one of THOSE crafters. My hardest challenge is to veer off my monochromatic color template and add spots of colors to spice things up.

Anyway, so that's my post for today. exciting. I do have two "real" scrapbook pages to post, but I haven't taken a picture of them yet. Nothing new to post from PSE, either. One page in progress, still two lessons to complete in my "up and running" course.

This week is very busy with doctor appts and other things to do, plus we are heading south to Dallas for the weekend. So I don't know if I'll have much time to be creative. Boo hoo. :(

Week 2 Bonus Layout

So this layout came together a lot faster than I thought it would! I'm pretty damn impressed with myself as well. :)

The paper and "brush" (the stamped thingie in the lower left corner) are from the freebies from the class. The strip of Paper is from Jessica Sprague's Echoes of Asia kit, which was free to us for being in the class (not sure if its free to everyone...I suggest you just go to her site and look around). The title is an alpha from a kit called Sweet Romance, as well as the gems on the bottom, which I got for free from Let Me Scrapbook!.

I'm typically not one for plain scrapbook pages which don't involve layers (I'm all about layering cardstock under photos!), but I think this turned out really nice. Very calm, and really helps to get the point across that this was our reunion after 7 months. I could have put a bunch of journaling on there...but why? You all know we're happy. :)

I'm definitely enjoying this class I'm taking...and I can already tell she's probably sucked me in for her two other in-depth classes (which are, of course, more money!) But it is just too convenient for someone to walk me through all of the ins and outs of Photoshop. She also provides a printout of step-by-step instructions for the lessons, so I can go back and find out how to do something. I also believe I will ALWAYS have access to this class, so if I forget how to do something, I can go back and find it in her videos. Nice!!

I'm loving my new foray into digital scrapbooking...and my husband loves that I'm happy about it. And he feels very special for buying PSE for me in the first place. :)

Lesson 2 Layout

Okay. Here is my lesson 2 layout. This one really frustrated me. Some of the parts were apparently easy...but I had difficulty. And a couple of times she seemed to jump ahead as if we already knew that step, then would backtrack to explain it...and I had already paused the video trying to figure out how she did what she did. Ugh.

So this layout came with the frame already established, as well as the date mumbo jumbo at the bottom. The blue flourishes and the bottom orange one were already there. I added both photos, the green circles for the date info, the bulleted paragraph, and the orange flourish on the top left. Oh, and the title, which was pieced together with an alphabet that was included. That was HARD. For some reason, my PSE just didn't want to do that one! It took me forever. I was getting really frustrated. I finally just closed everything, opened it back up, and it was fine. I guess that is PSE's version of control-alt-delete. :)

So in Lesson 2 we learned how to do bullets, which are more involved than you would think. Also just silly things, like changing the font to make words stand out. We also learned how to choose two layers (in this case, the two pictures) and "combine" them so any changes you make will change both of them. In this case, it made getting them to be even a lot easier. We did the same type of situation with the bullets and with Cameron's name. Essentially the Microsoft Office version of "merge". We also learned how to do the swirly flourish in the top left, which was a "brush". That is the fancy way of saying STAMP. Really involved. Right now it seems too difficult for me to do on my own (you can create your own brushes...eeek!) so I don't think I'll do many of those until I've taken more in depth classes that have more details.

So I have no idea what the homework assignment is. I had this issue with the first lesson too: for some reason, the info just doesn't show up when I get to that screen. Its as if there is a huge paragraph missing or something. Very frustrating! I can get to the bonus materials, but can't see the actual assignment for lesson 2. So I'm frustrated. With the lesson 1 assignment, I just kept clicking and going back, then clicking again...and suddenly the info appeared. Weird. So I might have something else to post...or I might not. Who knows!

Page from Lesson 1 Freebies

Okay.



I don't even want to admit how long it has taken me to get this posted. Seriously. I have had the darndest time! I was convinced that it was Blogger's fault. Blogger was creating the problem. Blogger was hiccuping and wouldn't let me post the picture. Its' always BLOGGER'S fault.










Ummm.........not exactly.

It really does help when you're trying to upload a PICTURE if you save the stupid document as a picture, and not as a Photoshop Elements document. DUH!!! So it kept saying, "Internet Explorer cannot display". And I kept getting more and more irate at Blogger. WTF, Blogger?!?! Its YOU! Its always YOU!

Nope. Its me. I'm stupid. There you have it.

So anyway, this digi page was created using elements in the "freebies" of the "bonus lesson" from lesson 1 with Jessica Sprague. Golly, that's a mouthful.
Each lesson comes with a lesson, bonus lesson (essentially a homework assignment) and then freebies you can mess around with. So I've already posted my original lesson page, as well as the bonus lesson page, so the page above is the page that I created from scratch using the freebies. It wasn't too hard, but then again, I didn't really do anything out of the ordinary. I'm still needing to learn how to do things like use a corner rounder on pictures or elements, and I want to find out if there's a way to create punched borders out of elements as well. I did figure out how to cut out what looks like strips of paper (the two on the left) out of paper she included in the freebies. I also created a layer for the picture of Cameron, and added the gems from another kit I have (and I totally don't know who I got it from...bad scrapper for not giving props to whoever created that! Bad scrapper!).

I'm now halfway through Lesson 2. I've had some issues with the class being geared towards Photoshop Elements 5 and 6, whereas I have version 8. And sometimes Jessica makes things seem really easy, when they aren't. Right now we're learning how to cut letters out of an alphabet...and my PSE was giving me fits over it! Took me forever to get it all cut out...and it took her about 20 seconds. :) Oh well. Live and learn.

Hopefully I'll post that later tonight. My son is having a hell of a week, and is definitely showing signs of the power struggles we are going to have with him as he hits full swing in toddlerhood. His two new problem areas are bedtime and mealtime. Kinda important things, don't you think?? He fights bedtime every night now, which is so not typical for him! We're not sure if he's just fighting it because he's still not used to the change of my husband being home again, or if this is just how things are going to be from now on. But it can take us anywhere from 20 minutes to 90 minutes to get him settled down...when it used to take me NO TIME AT ALL. Seriously, I would put him in his crib, say goodnight, and he would go to sleep. So battling for an hour is really stressing us out.

Mealtime, his new thing is to take a mouthful of something, chew it half up, then spit it out on the tray. Then he grabs it and throws it. Yep, fun fun fun! The amusing thing is, he doesn't do it with items he doesn't like. He does it with the stuff he likes. Its such a game!! We're having a really hard time doing what we SHOULD be doing, which is just not giving in to him. But when you've had a child basically fuss all day, you're much more likely to pop the damn waffle in the toaster that you know he'll eat rather than listen to him cry for another 3 hours. Ugh. I'm exhausted just thinking about this. Needless to say, I'm NOT looking forward to when Cameron actually turns two.

Lesson 1 in Photoshop plus "homework"

Oy.

I've been fiddling with this lesson for 2 hours now!

I told you recently that I was going to take a class from Jessica Sprague called "Up and Running with Photoshop". Photoshop is DEFINITELY not a program where you can just wing it. Its not even a program where you can fiddle and figure it out on your own! Especially considering with every new update Adobe makes, new things are added and slight changes wreak havoc on a class where you are supposed to follow explicit directions.

Case and point. During the lesson, we are taught how to change the font color. In PSE 5 and 6, you can just be in the color wheel, drag your mouse over your page, and pick the color on your page that you want your font to be (in the example below, see the striped piece of paper with some brown splotches? We were supposed to just "click" on the brown and it would match the color). My version of PSE, Version 8, doesn't do that. I just had to pick something in this weird spectrum to try and match. A lot of other times things weren't where they were supposed to be, according to the tutorial.

Halfway through the lesson (which is supposed to take 50-60 minutes, by the way), Adobe just decided it wasn't working and shut down. Wonderful! Thank goodness I had just saved the project or I would have been PISSED! Anyway, it took awhile to get it back up and running, find my place, and move on.

So, here's my conundrum. In this lesson, she teaches you how to save your project three ways:
1. As a PSE document
2. As a JPEG (for printing purposes)
3. As a "web friendly" document for adding to galleries and blogs.

The web-friendly document is a lot smaller, but really involved with saving in this format. My version of PSE didn't like her directions. Following her directions somehow changed my document from 12 inches wide to 50 inches wide. Can you imagine printing that sucker?!?! So I decided a slight experiment. I uploaded both the JPeg and the web-friendly versions onto here. See any difference? I really can't.




I was slightly bummed when I bought the course (for 45 bucks) and realized this is pretty much a template. All we did was add the photo, the "grunge frame", as she called it, the text box, date, and the star at the top. That's it. While it was still engaging and interesting to learn how to do all of that, I had really hoped to learn how to cut out specific bits of paper to really "accessorize" my pages. After cutting out the star, I **think** I know how it will be done...but maybe in future lessons she's more specific about it.


So, after you complete a lesson, you get a bonus lesson (aka: homework) and I'm guessing each bonus lesson has some freebies like this one did. Took me forever to find it: for some reason, I kept clicking and the link to download the freebies never showed up. I don't know how I did it, but here it is. Again, a template. BUT, she did include the paper and some other embellishments should I decide to try my luck at creating something unique later on. I'm just about Photo-shopped out tonight, so maybe tomorrow. :)



On this one we were taught how to change a photo to black and white (really weird: you get to mess around with everything! I could have made Cameron out to be a freakin' ghost if I wanted to!!). Then we were supposed to use the things we were taught in the first lesson to add a text box and make sure it was spaced correctly on the lines that were already provided. I added a date on the bottom, just like what we did on the other page...but I have to admit, I think its too big and I'll probably go back and change it.

So there you have it. Two more digi pages. I'm on a roll. :)

First "real" digi layout

Okay, I don't think this is half bad for my first layout without any lessons or anything! Thank goodness my friend Michelle has some great links on her website at Scrappy Towne (and yay for her, she just became a designer and has some really cute things I'll probably be buying!!) for freebies. She linked this wonderful site called Lori's Freebie List, which is where I found this wonderful animal freebie kit by a woman named Tami.

I still have lots to learn, trust me! I couldn't figure out how to essentially "cut" a paper piece to make layers, nor could I figure out how to get layers for under the photos. I also want to find out if there is a way to add photos in different shapes. I was pretty pumped to figure out (by myself, yay me!) how to turn the photos so they had a cuter look, as well as correctly downloading and "installing" the free fonts I've added, which were courtesy of Free Scrapbook Fonts.

I'm very excited to spend some more time surfing the net and finding some freebies, as well as learning more of Photoshop. I'm having loads of fun!!!