Beautiful Mess

Good morning, Sherry here to show you a wonderful layout from Cilenia's gallery.  As you know, the Follow Your Art designers have released their second FYA kit for May, with the theme of Journey.  Sabrina took pieces from the kits of all 3 designers to create this powerful layout called Today Is The Day:


This layout is visually striking before you even read her journaling.  The journaling is a masterpiece in itself (click to see a larger version that is more easily readable).  I believe Sabrina added the horse silhouette, and I love how she has blended the word Journey into his chest - that gives us a great visual of the type of Journey Sabrina speaks of here.  The color palette is so peaceful and serene, and I love the bird silhouette - another great visual making the point of the layout.  Sabrina is a wonderful artist and writer and she has put those talents to great use here to create this layout that really shines!

You can get Cilenia's Follow Your Art Journey bundle here:

Last weekend we got in a little studio time. My daughter Kallie needed to lighten up her new living room with brown walls and no color at all. So we went hunting! Found some great prices on canvases so told her we could just make it! LOL We found some inspiration to set the color theme and decided on clocks for an overall theme and played off the circle shape of the face for the art and went to work.

I used modeling paste to create the deep textures for the circles applying with a palette knife and applied to a clock stencil I have. (Hind site... next time I'm coloring the background first!) lol We decided we liked the white for the clocks after the fact.

I stuck with lighter tones of color to help lighten the room up, but brought in touches of the browns and ocher colors and there is also a touch of a slate teal blue/green in here too. I loved the way these came out! Not exactly my style, but fits right in with the look Kallie wanted. Modern geometric but with touches of grunge and artsy. Even Miss Bailey got her hands into this with us!

Was a good day!

Good morning, Sherry here - it's Thursday and time for a Photoshop tip!  Today's tip is something I learned about 6 months ago that has brought me many smiles and saved great frustration.  Here's the scenario:  I have a layout started, and I want to place another element on the page.  I open the element into Photoshop, and I use Window-Arrange-Tile so that I can see all my open windows on the screen.  So if I wanted to put my new element onto my layout, I would use my move tool, clicking on some special space that might or might not actually allow me to drag the element onto my layout.  It worked a lot of the time, but there were too many times it didn't work.

Good morning, Sherry here to bring you a great featured layout from Cilenia's gallery!   Cilenia has a wonderful new product in her store this week, and it's called Scribbles and Scripts.  I have to admit I couldn't figure out what this was until I got it and opened it up, and wow, I was so excited!  Let me show you this layout, and then we can talk more about it.  It is by mystampin and it's called Time Heal Thy Wounds:

Click preview to see full credits

Okay now.  Scribbles and Scripts contains 3 overlays that are 12 x 12 in size, and 3 smaller photo mats.  Beth has used an overlay and a mat in her layout here.  You see the inked edges here, as well as the writing in the corner and the scribbles in the bottom corners - that's what makes up the 12 x 12 overlay.  Don't you just love the effect?  And then you see the mat is the heart and the words on top of it, as well as the ink splotches inside and outside the heart.  Now that I have seen these products, I am so in love with them!  What a great tool to add that extra oomph to your layout and give it a real art journal feel!

You can get Scribbles and Scripts here:


Don't lose any time, pick them up today!

When I scrapped all paper long ago, I loved getting all artsy on my backgrounds to ground and matte my photos and add inspirational script writing that was faint, but gave an artsy effect too.  Of course, I did this with real inks and paints... but now you can do it too with my digital Scribbles and Scripts!

Front

Hi there!  Sherry here with a little Photoshop tip that will hopefully make your work flow a little easier.

Sometimes it's so time-consuming to switch out tools when you are caught up in the process of creating a masterpiece.  So if you are working away and need to switch to the move tool for a minute, pressing the Cmd/Ctrl key will do that for you, and then as soon as you let it go, you revert to whatever you were doing before.  Also, pressing the space bar will switch you to the hand tool, again reverting back when you let it go.

Try it you'll like it!

Good morning!  Sherry here to bring you a bit of inspiration from Cilenia's gallery.  Today we are going to look at a great layout created using Cilenia's Follow Your Art May - Strength bundle.  It was created by mystampin, and it's called Friendship:


I love the concept of strength through friendship - friends are definitely a huge source of strength to us all, in fact our friendships even help determine how long we will live.  Beth has really outdone herself in the creation of this page.  She took the Strength title from one of the papers in this kit, which looks wonderful.  But the stars of her page are the two friend dolls!  Such creativity reflected here!  She used a brush for the doll's faces, and the hair comes from brads that are in Cilenia's kit.  What a great use of tags to create their bodies, and I love the string that binds them together, with such strength.  And backing them up with mats really makes them stand out even more.  Beth put a lot of thought into this layout, with the result being a spectacular page, perfect for art journaling.

You can get Cilenia's Follow Your Art May - Strength bundle here:


Be sure to stop by and pick up this bundle today - it's 33% off today, so it's a great time to buy!

Hi everyone!

Good morning, Sherry here with another Photoshop Quick Tip!  This will allow you to easily create a selection from a layer or a mask.  By holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on a layer thumbnail, you create a selection from the contents of that layer.  How might you use this?  Let's say you have a shape in your document and you want to cut the shape out of your paper.  Ctrl-click on the shape layer, then select the layer of the paper you wish to cut in the shape, press Ctrl-shift-I to invert the selection, then Delete to delete the extra paper.  Click the eye beside the original shape layer to remove its visibility, and you will see your new shape created with your desired paper.  You could also use this to select text for the same purpose, and I'm sure you can think of other ways that this "instant selection" tip could be helpful.  Go forth and explore!