Another month of mainly photos of the kids – can’t expect much more from a SAHM who forgets the camera sometimes

 Download here: http://www.4shared.com/file/139790274/8334221a/SB_-_Building_Blocks_Numerals.html

Got the numerals and brackets done to go with my Building Block Alpha. Hope you find the set useful. Happy Scrappin’.

Download here: http://www.4shared.com/file/138434304/28862806/SB_-_Building_Block_Alpha.html

Cam got an invitation to a lego themed birthday party a while ago and the mum had done an excellent job on the invite finishing off with 3D lettering from Lego Digital Designer. So I went on a fruitless search for a freebie Lego/block alpha to scrap with and ended up having to make my own.   This alpha is not “lego” so as not to infringe on trademarks etc. and is caps only. I’ll do numbers in the next couple of days.

Oops, the camera had a bit of a rest this month.

Better late than never….

I decided about a month ago to do the 40hr Famine this year, can’t believe it’s been about 12yrs since I did it last. This time I’m doing the food famine & the technology famine (yep that’s right no computer, TV, mobile phone, stereo or microwave) to help raise money for hungry kids affected by the Global Food Crisis.
Do you realise that the price of rice in many third world countries has doubled or even tripled in price in the last 2 years? What if the price of milk, bread and fruit & vege doubled here – imagine the outcry. Most of us would cope, but if you were barely able to afford it before, what would you do if it doubled?
Funds raised this year are being used mainly in Kenya & Cambodia for emergency food aid, clean water access and seed & tools for farmers.
I might not be able to do much about the approx 1 billion people who go hungry every day, but so far I’ve raised (thanks to generous friends & family) enough to provide help for 50 kids for a month. Maybe not much in the whole scheme of things – but it is to any one of those 50 kids. And by signing up as a Group Leader, 9 of the teens from church have also volunteered to do the famine too.
So I may not be able to do much about the 1 billion hungry people, but I will do something….will you help too! You can donate securely online at www.40hourfamine.com

Bit late this month – just plain forgot to start the LO…..

Finished Jessica Sprague’s  free 2wk photo editing class yesterday and I did learn a few new techniques and did some things to photos that I wouldn’t have tried before. (No way I would have taken the time to put 3 different texture overlays on one photo).

I’ve always tended to try to keep my photos uncluttered and uncovered on my scrapping layouts, but I do tend to crop them closely. This has forced me not to crop but to use those negative spaces for wordart or brushes.  Jessica also uses a lot of layer masks & clipping masks which I’ve only got a handle on properly in the last few months. Gimp and clipping masks don’t go together as easily, but I can work around stuff like that. Did pretty well following the Photoshop tutes too considering I use Gimp but watching the videos - there is probably nothing that would make me change to PS.

The timing of the tute releases each day worked out really well. They came out right around TV time for the kids  so I usually had an uninterrupted 40mins or so and that was usually long enough to watch the video, find a suitable photo (not always easy), use that day’s technique on the photo & save & upload to the gallery.  All in all a lot of fun!!

1. Add frame & wordart  2. Brushes 3. Vintage hand-tinted look 4. Clipping masks 5. Textures 6. TTV 7. Type 8. Edge Burn (liked this and hadn’t tried it before) 9. Bit of everything 10. Selective recolouring 11. Storyboard 12. Collage 13. Selectively coloured collage.

Found a good tutorial on recolouring “brushes” with multiple colours here: http://www.obsidiandawn.com/using-multiple-colors-with-photoshop-brushes-tutorial (if I blog it, I can find it again).  I had a number of greyscale flower brushes sitting on Gimp for quite a while and hadn’t really used them because it seemed too difficult to colour them to anything like realistic. But this method is pretty simple and this was the result: (although I did 2 black layers at the bottom and none at the top to get more definition)

The layout says it all…..