glitter sig tag

One of my Paint Shop Pro students liked a certain glitter fill that is used in one of the lessons, so she asked me for it.  Being the kind of teacher that I am, I told her how to make it herself.

Of course, I had to test my tutorial before I sent to her, so then I had the glitter fill that she wanted.  Once I had it, then I had to use it.

I think this font is so funny!  I could do this with any font, though.  Would you like an animated sig tag like this?  Or maybe you like it more like this:

The background is transparent, so it will look good on any color blog or email.

If you would like a glitter tag, just email me and we can talk about colors, fonts, and art, and I will happily make one for you for free, just so I can exercise my mad PSP skills.  I'm that kind of girl. 

What's cookin'?

Just playing around with Paint Shop Pro - It's been a while since I made a card this way.  This is for the Dude Time Doodles Sketch challenge.

Freebie! Xmas adage tickets

I was thinking earlier today that I liked the look of adage tickets, but that they were 1) overpriced for what they are, and 2) not exactly to my taste. I wanted ones that had Christmassy messsages so I could add a quick sentiment to my last-minute holiday cards and crafting, without a fussy background, so I could match them to my cards, and cheap - always cheap. It occurred to me that I could make my own, so I did.

These are the tickets I made, and I will tell you how I did it, so you can do it too.  First, I printed them out from the image I will be giving you in a bit.  I placed them in a tight grid, 40 tickets to a sheet of cardstock.  To get perforations between the individual tickets, I ran the sheet through my sewing machine UNTHREADED - that made the little holes.  then I took a regular sized circle hole punch and punched at the intersections of the tickets to get that ticket corner look (it's fast - you do 4 corners at once!).  Then I cut it into the strips you see here.

I printed these on white, with the thought that I could burnish them with distress inks for color, or even stamp or color them (picture candy stripes!)  I could also print them on any color or type of cardstock I wished.  Tickets are one of the few things that look really good on construction paper. 

However, for this card, I thought the plain white background looked very nice:

 

You may recognize the reindeer from papiersalat by janna.   Everything else is scraps.  I cut the layer circles freehand; it seems to go with the reindeer.

so, would you like the tickets to print yourself?  Here they are!  Just click to enlarge and save to your computer.

If you take them, and especially if you use them, please leave a comment!  I would love to see what you do with them. 

Challenges:

2 Sisters - T'was the night...

Allsorts - last minute projects

Ellephantastic - Xmas

Delicious Doodles - recipe

Digis with attitude - anything with a digi

Stamp Something - digi

Have fun!

A cat of my own

You may recall that I had to draw 30 cats for a drawing assignment; to be honest, I probably did fifty before I had enough. Then I looked at the book and there were some additional assignments. The first was to digitize (scan) our best cat and apply the faux offset printing effect on it.



You have wonder about a book that teaches you how to doodle cats, but assumes that you can already do a faux offset printing effect digitally (is that a PhotoShop thing? Because in PSP, you have to juggle layers to do it).

Anyway, the next thing we were supposed to do with our cat was to use it in our normal art. My normal art is inchies, ATCs, and cards, so I printed out a sheet of cats in three sizes. Here are some inchies:



The shape of this cat makes it very easy to cut out, and since I had relatively thick lines, it reduced very well. The think the plainness of the cat really offsets the backgrounds. Now, to the ATCs:



I thought that this would be a good size to embellish an ATC while allowing a lot of background to show. I just had this painted background lying around, plenty for this ATC and the inchies. This fits the Gingersnap Creations paint challenge. The thing about acrylic paint is that it resists water based media, but you can use alcohol markers and pens on it just fine.



This was a colorblocked background that I made from old scraps of paper. I realized that my largest cat would fit on it fine if I turned it to a landscape orientation.

I like a plain white cat, but it also occured to me that the cat would take well to coloring, paper piecing, and even this:



At this size, the lines are bold enough to hold their own against the zentangling. I was going to leave more white space so that the cat would look like this one that I know in real life, but I got carried away. The cat is in my computer, I guess I can do whatever I want with him.

What a coincidence that the theme at Fun with ATCs is cats!

Would you like to play with my cat? Here is the plain scanned HiRes image:



Just click it to see it full size. If you use it, I would love to see what you make! Share it and I will send some love your way.

Glitter and Ink

Vicky knows how much I like glitter and ink and Paint Shop Pro, so she made me this sig tag:



Thanks, Vicky! If you ask nicely, she might make one for you, too!

Patches minus the patch (and a few other things)

It's the beginning of the month, and the beginning of another wave of digital freebies from Designed2Delight. This week's gift is an image of a bunny in a sweater with easter eggs. I don't do easter cards, so I wasn't particularly enthused, but the rabbit is cute. I pulled the image into my Paint Shop Pro to see about removing the basket and eggs, and ended up removing a lot more than that. After I stripped the image down to a plain bunny in a plain shirt, I decided that the image looked a little... static. How to liven a static image? Moving parts!



I made him into an art doll, with moving limbs and ears, and I even added some googly eyes! This was a lot of fun to do, and not difficult at all. Oh, and the colors he is wearing are for the Sunflowers and Dragonflies challenge. He is also nice and Springy for Get Sketchy.

In case you are wondering about the size, here is my bunny folded up and put in an ATC sleeve.



If you want to learn how to make an art doll, there is a great tutorial at 2cre8art.

Airbrush cat

One of the techniques in the current TJ newsletter is Airbrushed Markers, which uses Copic markers and the Copic airbrush system. I don't have either of those, so I used the airbrush I have.

The digital stamp is from Wink Wink Ink. I have wanted to be able to put my cat on a card for a long time, but couldn't, because my cat is a tuxedo cat, which is to say, she is mostly black with white on her face and chest, and on her feet. Cats like this are often named Socks or Boots, or Fred Astaire, and sometimes a cat with these marking could be a Kitler, but my cat is not one of those. Her name is Vampire, not only because of the tuxedo, but she has sharp fangs, sleeps all day, and looks like she has the letter V on her nose. This stamp is perfect for her.



The biggest problem with coloring black cats with a black outline is how readily it turns into a black blob. The lines disappear in all that black. If you use very dark gray, it just looks like a dark gray cat. However, by airbrushing black ink, you get thinner and thicker applications of black, which reveals enough detail to make out the shape of the cat, and the fuzziness is perfect for the fur. I am very pleased to be able to showcase my cat on a card.

I glossed up the eyes with a Glaze Gelly pen, and used a Milky Gel to draw in the white whiskers after I applied her to the backing. After I finished the cat, I had to fussy-cut her out of the background, and I picked a pretty paper to put behind her, and then I was stumped. what else to do? I looked for a sketch to perk up the card, and this CPS layout had some interesting lines, but I think it needs a little something else. It has plenty of hearts for the Belli challenge and the Inky Impressions Challenge. Any suggestions?

Old and new

I like the Sketch and Stash challenges because you don't only have to make a card, you have to use something in your stash that hasn't been used in a long time, if ever. This card has some of that, and some new stuff, too.



The background paper I just bought today, in a DCWV mat stack. There isn't really any need to buy large pads of paper when I can get the same patterns in a mat stack, and the scale of the patterns are better for cards, too. The image was one I altered yesterday - she was wearing a brown hat with a green bow and a beige dress when I started tweaking her. The sentiment is one very long stamp that I cut into three pieces. I think it is a great stamp, but it won't fit on a portrait-oriented card. For that reason, it probably has seen ink in over two years. The flower is old, too. My mother gave it to me, along with a bunch of other flowers, all stripped from silk foliage. She doesn't see the point of buying primas, not when silk flowers are so cheap. I'm inclined to agree.

First snow

It's the first snow of the year, and I wanted a photo of my house for my christmas cards. I couldn't resist using the tilt-shift filter on this photo - I think it makes it look like a train scenery miniature (click the photo to see it full size).

Dodecahedron ornament from flower punch + freebie!

I like dodecahedrons, and I've struggled for years with making them, mostly because I'm too lazy to cut all the pieces out by hand neatly (neatly being the important part). However, it just occurred to me recently that I could make one out of a five-petalled flower from a punch, and it might even make a nice ornament.



I included the punch with this picture, and the blue one next to the punch is my prototype (not so great, eh?). After I made it, I found it it was a lot easier to decorate before assembling the bits. I thought it would be hard to stamp something consistently amazing 12 times, so I decided the best way to go would be to make digital punchable images, and assemble the dodecahedron from there.



This is my finished product, for the Spotlight challenge, and the recently discovered (I keep finding new challenge blogs!) Inky Impressions challenge. I just found Inky Impressions today - they sell the kind of stamps I love to buy, deeply etched rubber with EZ Mount. They are looking for members for their design team right now, too! But, I digress...

I have saved the printable file as a .pdf - it has 24 punchables, enough to make two different dodecahedrons (the other one has different vintage image, I will probably post it later after I assemble it). If you have this punch and would like the file, download it here from Google Docs. If you don't have the punch but don't mind sitting and cutting a lot of pieces with scissors, you can use this file too. It could be a fun project to make with the kids if you are bored after dinner next weekend.

You can make this kind of ornament out of any five-petalled flower or even a star. If you try it, and post it somewhere online, leave me a link - I would love to see it!

Remember, my sig tag is a clickable link to my email...

Glimmer paper and alcohol markers

A lot of you are playing with alcohol markers (copics) now, and needing to buy expensive white paper to print your images, like Neenah and GP coverstock. Anything less tears up or soaks through (or so I've heard - I've only used Silver Lustre for my coloring up until now).

I figured that since I already had nice Glimmer Paper (PaperTemptress), I would try that with my ghetto copics (Bic Mark-its). Although I had white, I wanted to use a colored paper to see how the color would show through the mark-its.



This is so shimmery - really a lot like stained glass. The ink puddled a little on the glimmer paper, almost like a watercolor, but dried fairly quickly. I bet it would be a dream to blend on a larger image - this one is less than two inches across, no room for blending colors.

The layout is from Get Sketchy, downsized and rotated a little. I wanted to make an ATC using the digital background I created yesterday, from a photo of a martian landscape that I found online. I used a blend mode with a gradient to colorize the image, then an enamel filter to increase the depth. Unfortunately, you hardly notice it for all the bling and ribbon and glimmer - it almost seems a waste of a trip to Mars. It's a good thing those good folks at NASA had other things than my artistic needs in mind.

Powerpunch

This is an awesome tool; I can't believe I never heard of it before now. I spent a shameful amount of time putting holes in paper.



This is done on glimmer paper from the PaperTemptress, of course. It was starting to look very boxy, so I used the Out of the Box technique on the lady. I will need to practice holding my paper still while punching, but pressing the button on those punches just got very easy. If you have button punches but avoid using them because it is so hard to press them, you have to have a Powerpunch.

Red Hat words

The awesome thing (to me) about this card is not the card itself, but the paper. I made that, with a little software support. It took a long time, but like all things on the computer, once you have it, you have it forever.


I started out feeding words into wordle, and tweaking it to get a nice cloud. I was a little frustrated, because when you make a word cloud, you don't get repeats of words, you get your more frequently used words to show up larger. I finally grabbed the cloud I made and brought it into Paint Shop Pro, and did a pattern edit to add extra words and to make it into a seamless tile. I then printed it out to make Red Hat Society cards.

This turned out to be a horrible idea. If you have words in your patterned paper, it is almost impossible use any kind of sentiment on your card. I was also having a hard time coloring the hat stamps to match - I may have to resort to paper piecing. In the interim, these nice organdy flowers seemed to work well. The background paper was digitally textured, too. Most cardmakers know about printing out an image to color, fewer know about printing textures on a background. If you print a color on a similarly colored cardstock, you save a lot on printer ink.

I whipped this up for the Saturday Spotlight Challenge, and the Sunflowers and Dragonflies Flower Power challenge. It isn't a headturner, but sometimes, clean and simple is all you need.

Sig tags and Google

Sig (signature) tags were the reason I learned to use Paint Shop Pro all those many years ago. I hated that other people had cooler email than I did. Of course, as soon as I started using sig tags myself, the recipients of my emails started complaining that my emails were too large and it was taking forever to upload their mail packets (those were the days of 14,400 modems); I had to stop using them as soon as I started, and so I found other things to do with PSP, but I never got back into using sig tags on my email.

I do have sig tags other than the one I use here, here are some I use currently in other places:


I scanned a Glamour Shots photo to make this tag. The picture is about 12 years old, but don't I look gorgeous?


I use this one a lot this time of year.


This one (and several of the others) was made for my position as a moderator in Stepping Stone Through PSP. I love this program for creating digital art and photo correction, and am thrilled to help others learn it as well. I wrote a tutorial on how to get this Warhol effect as my "graduation" project from the course.


This cat tag was an assignment I did while taking the SSTPSP course.


Just your basic photo tag.


This one uses a Yahoo avatar as the image. I like to think I look this good. Yes, I am in the Red Hat Society - I have another tag like this one that shows me wearing a hat, but it looks a little awkward, so I like this one better.

The one I use at the end of my blog posts I drew just to match the header, which I also drew. It does a couple of things that most other people's sig tags don't do.

First of all, it is a clickable link to my email address. I have mentioned that before, and I think that if I say it enough times, one day one of you, in a desire to contact me, will remember that, and think, "oh, I know how to email Juliet, I will just go to her blog and click her sigtag!" This assumes, of course, that you have either bookmarked my blog or are following it, but then, why wouldn't you?

Secondly, I have put my full name as the alt text. what this means, for those of you who are not html savvy, is that if you hover your cursor over my sig tag below, you will see my full name. Why would I do that? Google. I have a fairly unusual last name, and I don't want to give it out freely to just anyone traipsing through, but if you are someone who knows my name from other places (i.e. real life), if you google it you will end up here. That's a good thing.

If you would like me to make you a custom sig tag, I will happily do it for linkage. I can do it with or without the extra functions, as you prefer. If you have been reading this far, you know how to get ahold of me.

Sistah Thang

A friend of mine asked my to make some cards for her group, Sistah Thang, to commemorate a cruise they are taking at the end of the month. A project like that is more of a digital project than a stamping one, but the card has to look like I did some papercrafting, not just printing, so what I did is take the digital panels I created and glued them to a trishutter card base. Yes, I could have cut the trishutter card out of the printed cardstock, but the extra layer helps give that handcrafted look.



Have you ever scanned a dimensional object? the results are... interesting. Anyway, you should be able to get the gist of this card. I did a second prototype that I glittered up with Stickles, but I don't think it helped at all. Tomorrow I will take this card to my friend and see how she likes it. I will probably change some of the colors, but this is pretty close to what I think the end product will look like. Usually she pays me for making something like this for her in quantity, but I didn't feel comfortable charging this time, because some of the images on the card are copyrighted. I try to be legal. She will probably bake me a pie instead. I think I'd rather have the pie, anyway.

Another challenge Halloween ATC

I'm not done yet - I should pace myself, shouldn't I? This uses a very loose interpretation of a sketch from CPS to make another ATC.


There are two things of note about this card. One is the cauldron. Some years ago, I did a digital tutorial on how to make a cauldron using the ellipse tool in Paint Shop Pro, and as I recalled that the little circles in the kit were supposed to be cauldron bubbles, I quickly applied what I knew about building a cauldron with ellipses to using my circle and oval punches.(I only discovered the punched cauldron in the kit after I had made my own). I used the greenish wrinkly stuff for the brew, and since I used the punchinella in the kit as a background layer, I ended up not using the cauldron bubbles at all.
The moon image is also from the kit; it is punched from yellow vellum. I don't have vellum tape, and I had read earlier on the SumOfAllATCs that one shouldn't use liquid glue on vellum, but that double-Stick tape was pretty good. I put a strip of double-stick tape behind the top third of the moon, which was good enough to hold it, but there was sticky showing through the eyes. That is why I glittered the eyes - it's hiding the sticky. The glitter is embossing glitter from CTMH. The leaves are paper confetti that I picked up at Target a couple of years ago, sponged with a little distress ink to tone down the brightness. I use some of it every fall, and I don't think I will ever run out.
I have not even begun to scratch the surface of what was in this kit. To see photos of the entire contents, and perhaps even grab one of the last few available, you should join TheSumOfAllATCs. They do swap more than just ATCs; the charm swap I've been going on about is hosted there, too.

Digital Challenge

Susan, one of my swapping friends, asked for some digital art help. She had three images that she wanted to combine into one. I have pretty good Paint Shop Pro skills, so I offered to give it a shot. Here are the three images:





That first one is a real eye-opener, isn't it?

I used the scratch remover to eliminate the text on the body, and the deformation tool to squeeze the breasts a little closer together. I reduced the color saturation and increased the brightness and contrast to get the body to match the face.

On the necklace, I just erased everything in the picture that wasn't the actual necklace.

For the head, I erased everything but the head, and drew in new shoulders (ellipse). I then merged the head image with the body, and used the push tool to blend the colors. I finally applied the necklace with a little drop shadow.

Final result:



Actually, this isn't the final result, Susan asked me to change the eye color (easy to do with the color replacer), so only she and I have seen that version. After reading Susan's description of what she plans to do with the image, this should be a very cool ATC.


Update:
Here is the finished card: