Brush Abilities - It's a Doo-Dad Day

It's day 3 of my photoshop class, and today we learned how to make these quick little sanded doo-dad's. It was fun to learn how to make my own elements. My new skill of the day was using a circle selection and alt-shift to draw perfect circles!

Brush Abilities - Day2

Today I was asked to name 4 things that made me smile today (I was asked at 9am). Here are my 4 things:
1) The coo of the morning doves
2) Patchy blue sky
3) Big rain drops (Yep! It rained today!)
4) Wearing my new shoes for the first time

On to today's PSE brush class. The class was about text on a frame. This is to be used as a wall hanging. The only thing I learned today is ctl-shift-j is used to justify text.

I replaced her quote which was:

It is not part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know,so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.


... with a quote of my own choosing (another one from Steve Prefontaine). Here is my project:

With some nicer colors, this quote would make a nice wall hanging in Chris's room. Do you think it will motivate him?

Everyone have a great Wednesday!

Happy Anniversary - Part II

Look what I found as my desktop wallpaper when I fired up my laptop today! The kids did this on their own. Cheryl and Chris took quite a while figuring out how to use Photoshop and how to save a desktop image. Aren't they the sweetest?!!!

Brush Abilities - Day 1

The brushes class started today! YAHOO!!! There was so much free brushes to download today that I'm just getting around to doing the lesson now. I even learned how to use a couple new tools like (Edit->Stroke and Edit->Fill Layer).

The first half of the lesson left us off with a stamped butterfly with offset outline.

The second part of the lesson added more butterflies and patterned paper.

So, that was our lesson for the day using a butterfly brush and one piece of digital patterned paper.

The class is two weeks long, so I'll have more tomorrow! Thanks for checking in!

NOTE: Create the outline.
Create and select a new layer. Control-Click on image to select (or draw a selction rectangle). Menu Edit - stroke outline selection. Set width to 5px

To change color of the outline. Menu edit - fill layer, check box preserve transparency.

Stamping - click on brush and play with menu items

Happy Anniversary to US!

We've been married 24 years today!
The three things I love best about Jim are:
1) He's friendly and easy going.
2) He shares in the cooking and cleaning.
3) He loves me and the kids.

Love you, Jim! Happy Anniversary!

It's Blog Hop Time!

Welcome to the Scrapbook Deals for You blog hop! The Summer challenge is to create a layout, card or project using a sketch. There are a lot of sketch sites out there.
I picked this sketch from Ali Edwards. I love her clean, simple style. I used one of the photos that I created during the Photoshop class and created this layout! I really like how it all came together!

To see the whole blog hop list, go to the SD4U MB.

Friday-5 : Obon!

It's the end of July already! I can't believe that summer is almost over. It's Friday and it's an early Friday-5 for a change! Today I'm sharing some photos from the last weekend's Obon.

Here's my mom and all the kids, decked out to dance!

... a little dancing action. There was a good turnout... three circles of dancers!

Here are the BIG kids, Chris, Cheryl and Hana, getting ready for the Fan Dance.

Jim decked out, LOL!

On the way home!
Cheryl is not going to be happy with me for this one, hehehe...

I hope everyone has a GREAT weekend!

Crafty Share

It's been a while since I've done a papercraft share. As I was downloading photos from my camera tonight, I came across photos of the two cards that I made for my mom's and dad's birthdays. Here they are:


I used copic markers to color the images. I'm not quite ready to break out the coloring books, but coloring with these markers is a lot of FUN!

Stay tuned! Coming this weekend is the Scrapbook Deals for you Summer Blog Hop!

Happy 5-Friday!

We are now officially in the middle of summer and this is the time of year where we usually go to Kauai. I love Kauai! The air has a wonderful sweet smell, it's beautiful and green, and I have family there. It's a great place to rest and unwind... eat and be lazy... hike and swim... Here are five of my favorite shots from summers past.

OC Fair 5K - Opening Day

We finally have the results from the OC Fair 5K! Chris and I both have new PRs!
Chris's time was 20.10. He came in 3rd in his age group and 21/625 overall (19th in men) that means only two women came in before him.
I came in at 24:03 (that's more than 5 minutes off my old PR). I came in 2nd in my age group, and 87/625 overall (23rd in women). The first place woman in my age group beat me by 2 seconds...

Unfortunately, they gave prizes to only the top three overall finishers, or Chris and I would have ended up with prizes :o)

This is the only photo I have of the race. You can see me pretty clearly. Chris is just to the left of me in the photo wearing an orange shirt and orange hat (you can just see the top of his head and a little of his shoulder).

New Classes at Jessica Sprague

I'm really excited about the new classes at Jessica Sprague! After taking my last class, I got a 20% off coupon that I put toward two more classes. In the first class, we'll finish a 20 page digital album in 20 days. I have an album I've been wanting to work on. This will be a great way for me to get a start on it! I was hoping to finish it before Christmas!

This class is all about digital brushes. I'm actually pretty good with brushes, so I was going to give this class a miss. But, since I had the 20% off coupon, I decided to go for it. The last class was so much FUN! I'm in the mood for more and don't want to wait until the end of August for the other class to start. The brush class starts in just one more week!