Downloading & Installing a Photoshop Brush

Posted on | November 16, 2007 | No Comments

Although you can buy all sorts of awesome digital scrapbook kits, there are also many free items available to download for your Photoshop program. All you have to do is:

Use your favorite search engine and type in “free photoshop brus.” One of my favorite site is Miss M’s site.
When you find the brush you want to download, you just click the download link and save the file to your hard drive.
Once downloaded, usually it’s a zip folder, extract the zip folder.
Open the folder and find the item that has a .abr extension.
Copy this item and paste it into your brushes folder. If you are using Photoshop Elements, usually the location is C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 6\Presets\Brushes or if it’s CS2 or similar it would be C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Presets\Brushes.

Starting Digital Scrapbooking in PSE

Posted on | November 16, 2007 | 2 Comments

This tutorial was done in Elements 4 but it’s the same concept for the most part. The important part of working with a digital scrapbooking in any Photoshop product is to understand the concept of layers and inserting new images, text, or brush on top of one another and rearranging these layers to your needs and liking. I have created a video on how to get started. Nothing fancy but hope it’ll help you understand the concept.

Happy Friday!

Posted on | November 16, 2007 | No Comments

It’s Friday, yay!!! So many things I want to do and need to do this weekend. First, my very good friend’s baby will be baptized tomorrow morning and she asked me to take the photos. I’m no professional photographer but I love taking photos and I’m not too bad – at least they’re clear and I’ve got Photoshop for other stuff. Then there’s a luncheon afterwards and that evening we have an event on campus, International Night, where students from different countries cook and it’s open to the community. For $5/person, it’s pretty good, plus our little Emma eats free.

Third, I want to make a card. I want to try one of the challenges at SCS. Not sure how great it’ll turn out to be but hey, it’s a start. Maybe it’ll help me get my creative juices out. Maybe if this is successful, I’d be able to make more Christmas cards and other cards that I need. Fourth… clean the house! Yes, our house is dirty. I say dirty because, thanks to my husband, we tidy up everyday. But with two dogs, the outside being moist each morning, and engineered flooring, you see dirty marks all over the place. So this weekend I plan on a good floor polishing job and just sweeping and dusting in general upstairs. I also need to tidy up my craft room. It’s got clutters of mail, stuff from our trip, etc. I guess each house needs a junk drawer and a junk room, huh?

Last but not least, I want to play the Sims 2 game. My husband just bought me the pet expansion and I want to play it. I’m off and on this this game, I’ll play it for a week or two and then I’ll not touch it for a few months. So I want to try to squeeze in some time for this, maybe before bedtime as usual, but longer time to play.

Today, I also want to share a photo of a lady that I took at an Indonesian market. She’s very old and and still working hard to survive. Is she happy, is she not? You can’t really tell. But in her old age she still needs to work to make a dollar a day. Each time I look or think of this photo I am in awe with the world and the different lives that we all live in. Good or bad, rich or poor, sick or in health, we’re all here to live and learn.

Lady at a market in Indonesia

The Last Nice Card I Made

Posted on | November 15, 2007 | 1 Comment

Well, I’m in some sort of funk, no inspiration or motivation to make anything worthwhile. This card was the last card that I made that’s reasonably good looking in my eyes (card created Nov. 3rd). This was a fairly easy card to make. The paper size is 8.5×4.25, fold it in half, stamp the snowman on the white, sprinkle some red embossing powder, use the heat gun, mount the white on the black, add some ribbons, paper pierce the bottom black paper and stamp the white text next to it.

Merry and Bright Snowman and Verse Christmas card

The 1 Minute Card

Posted on | November 14, 2007 | No Comments

Here’s the story: Last week my co-workers and myself got together so that we can hand write some, super late, “welcome to our campus” cards for new professional staff employees. The last card was sent out in March so between April and last week, we had 27 cards to do. Now, we’re not working for a big university and funding for silly things like this does not come easy so I managed to smuggled some card stock from my office’s supply closet, grabbed my own stamping stuff, figured some really easy design, and voila. In an hour we hand wrote and stamped 27 cards… we even stamped extras for later use, with “thank you” on some of them. In my experience, this was probably the easiest card that I have ever made.

1. Grab an 8.5×11 cardstock
2. Cut it so that you will produce two 8.5×5.5 pieces
3. Fold the cardstock
4. Randomly stamp the front of your card, I chose this stamp set because it’s neutral, male/female would be ok with it.
5. Stamp sentiment
6. You’re all done!

Hand stamped card