All About Cats

I haven't had much opportunity to create lately but I'm determined to try and produce more stuff over the next month.  I love my cat images and have decided to try and progress them further using different kind of craft methods so the first is a photo manipulation.  Next I hope to do some paper cutting which has become a new interest.

Framing and Mount Cutting Course

Wow, sorry folks, really neglected my blog lately but been away and ordinary life sometimes just takes over.

Just completed an amazing frame and mount cutting course at http://www.diyframing.com/.  This was a fantastic two day course where they taught you to make your own frames from scratch and different kinds of mounts including double mounts and offset corners.  Here is a pic of some of the work I did.

The frame started off as two pieces of wood.  Can't believe I did the frame in an afternoon.  The course was really excellent - can't praise it enough and now I have signed up for the canvas stretching and framing course.  At last I am going to get my and my hubby's work framed and fill up some of the bare walls in our house.

Time to wade through all the thousands of digital pictures of the last 8 years or so!

Caribbean in Color #5

Another picture converted in Photoshop Elements using the tutorial here:

As the theme for this week on Inspiration Avenue is Spring and Blossoms, thought I would add it there.

Caribbean in Color #4

In this picture I've added further changes to the technique demonstrated in my previous post:

• Instead of using the luminosity blend mode for the pen and ink layer, I used exclusion.
• I made a copy of all the layers (shift+ctrl+alt+e or cmd+option+shift+e MAC) and changed the blend mode of this new layer to luminosity. Switch off the pen and ink layer.
• I made an outline in black and white of the original with the white on top and shifted the black outline layer very slightly to get the embossed effect (could do this with effects instead with one layer if you wanted to).

Caribbean in Colour: #3 Tutorial

Here is the tutorial I promised showing you how to make a photo look like a drawing.

Coming soon, will be the next tutorial which will show you how I add a pattern to the 'drawing'.

Caribbean in Colour: #2

In the Caribbean pictures today I have given my photos a drawing-like quality and in the next couple of days I'm going to show you how I did it.  Unfortunately you will need the latest version of Photoshop Elements, version 11, but I love the new filter options and think it's worth it just for that.  You can download a trial version if you want to try it out before buying it.