2008 June | Scraps Of Mind

Archive for June, 2008

Posted by karooch on

June 9, 2008

June’s Hybrid Heart

Welcome to Scraps of Mind. I'm delighted to see you. Why not check out the site, you'll find a bunch of great scrapbooking and blogging articles, tips and tutorials on the Articles Page. And if you enjoy this or any other articles on Scraps of Mind, I'd really appreciate you giving them a thumbs up on StumbleUpon to share them with other Scrapbookers. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing more of you.

Last week I wrote an article on Hybrid Scrapbooking that woke an interest in a number of Scraps of Mind readers.

June from Scrapping by Design left this comment under the article:

“…I am currently making one of those little chipboard albums that is cut in a funky heart shape and fastened together with a ring on one side. I scanned one of the heart shaped pages into the computer, resized the image to make the heart about 25% smaller than the original, then using Photoshop’s Paste Into command, I pasted my pictures into the heart. The result is images that are the exact shape of the funky heart, but smaller so I can attach them to the book and have room for a border and embellishments. It would be tricky to do that if you didn’t use digital tools to get the effect.”

I really liked the sound of that and showed June a purse album I had made last year for my niece’s 18th birthday. And I asked June to let me know if she posted a picture of her purse album on the Internet so I could go and look at it.

Well, what an over-achiever June is!

Not only did she complete her album and put it up on the Internet, but she even made a video about it and put it on YouTube!

How cool is that?

So when you’ve had a look at this video, why not click over and check out Scrapping by Design. It’s a new blog but already June has a number of handy tutorials and scrapbook ideas on it that you’ll find useful; especially for the paper scrapbookers amongst you.

Saturday Scrapbooking Ideas

Saturday Scrapbooking Ideas #14

Colour is cool but sometimes black and white can be so much more.

Convert some of your colour photos to black and which and use them in your scrapbook layouts. You can mix and match them with your colour photos in a single layout for a great contrast.

Make your focal photo a large black and white one and have some small supporting photos in colour; perhaps as a collage in one corner.

It’s a great look so if you haven’t given it a try, why not base your next scrapbook layout on a black and white photo.

Learn digital scrapbooking now!

And take your scrapbooking to the next level.

Learn how at Step by Step Digital Scrapbook

Top 10 Scrapbook Ideas to rekindle your Inspiration

Posted by karooch on

June 6, 2008

Five Freebies on Friday - 6 June 2007

Let’s jump into this week’s Five Freebies on Friday round up. I hope you enjoy all the great Scrapbooking Freebie goodies I’ve found for you over the last week.

Just don’t forget to leave some love when you download your freebie. Remember a simple thank you comment makes all the difference to the designer who will have put a lot of time and effort into creating your freebie.

Well I have to kick off this week’s Five Freebies with a reminder the the free Yummy Treats Scrapbooking Recipe Book is going to be available for your downloading pleasure until the end of this month. Come and ge-et it!
To celebrate Spring, Mindy from Fresh Brewed has made this cute pastel mini kit for you.
And you can get this Florality Quick Page from Ayya’s Creative Designs.
And check out these great flourishes from Designer Digitals.
There’s a nice little kit of 4 papers and an overlay at Digitreats. Go check it out.

Are Scrapbookers Right Brained or Left Brained?

Some of you may have come across the dancing lady before and driven yourself cross-eyed trying to make her turn the opposite way.

For those of you who haven’t, this is an exercise to discover if you operate predominantly from the right side of your brain or the left. Some people see her turning clockwise and some see her turning counter-clockwise.

Further down this post is an explanation of what characteristics each side of the brain tends to promote.

But before you read that, I’d like to do a little experiment to see whether scrapbookers have a leaning to one side or the other.

You see although scrapbooking is clearly a creative occupation, and is terrific at bringing out a creative side of you that you might not have prevously realised you possessed, I think there is also a side to scrapbooking that appeals to those who like structure and planning.

So take a good long look at the dancing lady and then answer the survey below and let’s see whether scrapbooking attracts more right brained or left brained people. And by the way, there’s no ‘right’ (as in ‘correct’) answer to this.

n

How do you see the Dancing Lady?

I see her turning clockwise.

I see her turning counter-clockwise.

I can make her turn whichever way I want.

View Results

And for those who would like to what all this means:

If you see the dancer turning clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Left Brain Characteristics	Right Brain Characteristics
Uses Logic	Uses feeling
Order/pattern perception	Spatial perception
Ruled by facts	Ruled by imagination
Detail oriented	“Big Picture” oriented
Practical	Impetuous
Forms strategies	Presents possibilities
Safe	Risk taking
Words and language	Symbols and images
Can comprehend	Can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
Maths and science	Philosophy & religion
Reality based	Fantasy based
Past and present	Present and future
Knows object name	Knows object function
Acknowledges	Appreciates

So how did the lady dance for you?

And doesn’t she get dizzy going round and round like that?

Make a Transparent Scrapbook Layout

Transparent scrapbook layouts have been a feature of the paper scrapbooking world for a year or so.

They’re a cool scrapbook idea. You make them by creating your scrapbook layout using a transparent plastic sheet as your background. Like the ones used for overhead projection slides.

And there are a few things you need to consider when you plan your layout design.

First you need to think about how it is going to look from the back. Remember with a transparent background, the back of all of your elements can be seen on the reverse.

One of the ways around this is to think about doing a reverse layout on the other side of the transparency. To make this successful, it’s probably a good idea to keep your layout design relatively simple with large shapes dominating, that are easy to work with when you design your reverse layout.

And make sure you exploit the transparent aspect by leaving plenty of space to see through.

Transparent layouts can look very cool and there’s a certain sense of satisfction in creating one, because they present challenges that are different from ‘normal’ scrapbook layouts.

But can digital scrapbookers create transparent layouts too?

Answer: Yes!!

The real value of the transparent technique is in it’s physical form, not it’s digital form.

It’s easy to just colour the background of your layout white and it looks like a transparent layout on the screen. But once you print it out, there’ll be nothing transparent about it.

The trick for digital scrapbookers is to save the layout file as a PNG rather than a JPEG. That way you can print it onto a transparent sheet and all the transparency will remain intact.

In fact you can even take it one step further and add a couple of ‘real’ elements to your printed digital transparent layout. Say a ribbon or a border of buttons. Brads are not so good as they look pretty ugly on the reverse side.

Once again digital and paper scrapbooking techniques come together to result in great scrapbooking.

I love Hybrid Scrapbooking.

And don’t forget, if you are interested in getting started in digital scrapbooking, there’s a bunch of information and videos to get you up and running over at Step by Step Digital Scrapbook – the site that’s especially for the beginner to digital scrapbooking.

Texture Tuesday with Wildheart

Wildheart of Wildheart’s Works brings you Texture Tuesday. Wildheart is a Paintshop Pro expert, but I know you’ll enjoy the tips and tricks even if you’re not a PaintShop Pro user. And you’ll find plenty of ideas to help you work with textures in your own program.

Sharing some Camouflage Tiles

I was brainstorming for some ideas for this week’s installment and thought why not offer readers here some camouflage tiles to work with.

Ironically camouflage is one of the most searched for items when people are coming to Wildheart’s Works. To give you an idea of just how widely it is searched for let me give you a brief rundown of some stats for the last five months in relation to this.

How to Make Camouflage with Paint Shop Pro

January 1128
February 226
March 303
April 266
May 236

How to Make Camouflage Part Deux

January 317
February 749

For the keyword search camouflage

January 44
February 58
March 100
April 86
May 66

For the keyword camo

January 32
February 47
March 57
April 52
May 59

In the two tiles below all I did to give them a little texture was go to Adjust>Add Noise>Gaussian>Noise to 15%. Of course you can play with the settings until you find something you prefer. I just randomized the settings until I came across this one. I thought it looked very natural and not too grainy.

The original tiles were found just randomly surfing looking for free elements for paint shop pro.

Once again I would like to add if you have any questions , want to see a particular tip or trick that your having a hard time finding or want further information don’t hesitate to email me over at joecheray@gmail.com. I am also putting out a weekly newsletter so please let me know via comments or email also if you would like to be included in my email list.

The Little People

Here’s another really cute snippet from my friend Doreen.

She sent me this link to a really cute site called Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project.

This is sooo cute.

Slinkachoo is a British street artist and he has created and photographed these tiny scenes around Britain by handpainting the model people you get for model train sets and setting them up in various places around the country. He then photographs them and also takes a ’step back’ type shot so you can see the full perspective.

Apparently after he photographs them, Slinkachoo leaves these little folk in place to interact with any passers by who happern to notice them.

Here are a couple of pics from the site but you should definitely go and check the rest out for yourself.

Click on the pictures to enlarge, or better still click over to The Little People and see them all.

Having just finished rereading Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series, the concept of these little people scattered all over Britain totally appeals to me. And Doreen’s email was so timely that I just had to share it with you.