Bowes Clan

Digidare #260

tawyn — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:40:26 +0000

Congrats to the digidarers on their 5th anniversary!! I love playing along when I can.

In honour of 5 years, this weeks dare is all about 5′s – 5 papers, 5 fasteners, 5 alphas/fonts, 5 colours, journalling about 5′s.

This page has taken me entirely too long…. must simplify the process somehow although I did want lots of layering in this one. The alphas & shadowing seem to have been the time-sink today.

Credits: Papers & embellishments – Mye de Leon. Extras – GirlBoyGirl Designs, Anna Aspnes, AWP, Chili Designz, Laurie Anderson. Alphas – Kirsten Aagard, Kaye Winiecki, Polarfuchs Treasures. Paint – Cottage Arts, Taylormade, HG Designs. Fonts – 1942 report, own handwriting, ScrapCop messy paint.

Digidare #259

tawyn — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 05:42:14 +0000

This week’s digidare is to scrap a sky photo.

I’d seen some silhouetted “birds on a wire” frames while on holiday & thought I’d do a art journal piece trying to create a sunset from scratch with the birds sitting on wire, but the dare came up first

Lots of playing with blending this week & faking a HDR photo.

Credits: Papers – Alissa Jones & Kristin Aagard, Border – Tracie Stroud, Birds – Enlivendesigns, Hardware – Helene ? & Ikeagoddess, Font – Thinking of You.

Playing with Shadows

tawyn — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:47:41 +0000

I’m back to working on Peppermint Granberg’s shadowing class at Big Picture Classes again. I was inspired by the coloured circles for the muffin tins in Stacy Julian’s new class, so thought I’d do like a sampler to test out Peppermint’s shadow sizes. Went thru my stash & picked a large range of almost random embellishments that matched the colours in the circles then tried out Peppermint’s suggested sizes & settings. OK – had to tweak some as I like them a bit smaller, but I will be going with a bit bigger distance than I had been before. A happy morning of playing Credits: too numerous to mention!

How do you spell Dora?

VRBones — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:19:13 +0000

Little Miss 3 1/2 is taking more and more control over Master 6′s laptop.

Miss 3: “Daddy, I can’t find the dora games”

I walk over to find that she’s in Google, with “dor” already typed in, and a wealth of dora links and games on the screen.
Ooo K. Good start.

Daddy: “You just need to click on this top link”

Miss 3: “I don’t like the top one, they are bad”

Hmm, so much for Google’s plans for world domination if even a 3 year old knows not to click on the ads.

Daddy to Mummy: “Did you know that Miss 3 is using google? She knows how to spell Dora”

Mummy: “Yeah, Master 6 was teaching her yesterday”

Mummy to Miss 3: “How do you spell Dora?”

Miss 3: ” D – O – R”

Mummy: “And what else?”

Miss 3: “Umm … I know, Q!”

So close ….

I’m a happy little shadower

tawyn — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 01:10:12 +0000

Took another stab at Peppermint Granberg’s “Me & my Shadow” class from Big Picture Classes last night. You can find her basic free tutorial “Mind-blowing Drop Shadows ” on her blog .

I’m a GIMP girl. I love my GIMP (I love my computer). It can frustrate me at times however – like not having linear burn as a blend mode.

I decided to have another try at getting GIMP to do a “Linear Burn” seeing it is the basis of everything Peppermint’s talking about (yes it does look better!) And thankfully geekier brains than mine found that the “Linear Burn” formula is the inverse of the “Subtract” blend mode in GIMP. Hmm I can work with that.

So plunked down a flower, took her colour suggestion of #2c1901 (ok ok it was #2b1801 which is like 2 pips out on the sliders) and did the shadow. Default “Multiply” blend mode yep – meh! So I duplicated the flower & shadow layers linked them and moved them off to one side. Then unlinked them, selected the shadow layer and did “Colors/Invert” & changed the blend mode to “Subtract”. Hmm still meh! Where did my nice warm brownish shadow go, it’s gone back to a cold black. But at least zoomed in I can see the flecks in the kraft paper emphasised and it has definitely done a linear burn.

So time to try & warm the shadow back up. After playing around and checking it on different colour background papers, a darker & more saturated blue gave back the warmer shadow.

I liked both of these, but the one on the right I figured out in the end, had a pinkish shadow (I hate pink).

The one on the left gave me back the warmth of the dark brown from the multiply blend mode but with a linear burn bringing through the subtle grain & texture of the kraft paper.

Can’t see much difference?! Yep it’s really subtle. Should I have gone to this much effort? Probably not, but I NEED realistic drop shadows & once I found that I could get a linear burn, I had to follow the process right through. (and then I get almost to the end of this post & realise the shine on the flower centre is at the top right instead of the top left – doh! not fixing it now)

So in the end I have a flower shadowed with blue #9fb3ed set to Subtract blend mode.

I think I can now go WOOOOOO!!!

I think I broke it

tawyn — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:09:49 +0000

… my scrapping ticker I mean. 3 weeks to go in the year & I’ve already done an extra 7 LOs to what I was hoping to get done YAY!! I haven’t printed anything for a long time so photobooks are coming, fingers crossed that they arrive before Christmas for the grandparents.

Digidare #254

tawyn — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:29:35 +0000

Been thinking for a while that I must to a Bella LO, so this wks digidare to scrap an everyday inanimate object got me moving finally….

Actually scrapped with a template today which is not something I normally do. Don’t know why people think it’s faster??? Think it took me just as long but I certainly had more layers than usual (138 v. ~80 normally)

Credits: Template – Studio Basic Designs, Papers – Sabrina Dupree, Anna Aspnes & Disasterpiece Studio, Alpha – Kristin Aagard, Elements – Sabrina Dupree, Fishbowl Designs, Kim Broedelet, Studio Baers Garten, Font- Adler.

Ramblings, classes & stuff

tawyn — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:18:02 +0000

What a difference finally putting 16 “Week in the life” LOs & 12 BPC “Words to live by” LOs make to the blog scrapping ticker for the year. It’s taken me 4 mths to scrap the WITL project photos even with some Katie the scrapbook lady “powerscrapping” going on – very glad I did it that way but, it certainly worked for me.
I’d posted on facebook that it was time to start finishing some projects before starting new ones. So that’s 2 scrapping projects done. AJ’s party is the other big UFO…… but not yet!
For my X0th birthday my lovely in-laws gave me amongst other things, money for some scrapping classes so I have started some new stuff….. 3 self paced BPC classes & Elisha Snow’s workshop “Photo finish”. Already learning some good stuff, but need to keep up so they don’t become UFO’s too.
The 1 1/2 wks of mad activity at school has thankfully finished and we can wind down into summer holiday mode at last. I foresee lots of visits to the beach, some geocaching and visitors. My part of the Christmas shopping is almost done, but the to-do list is growing longer & longer….
Putting up the Christmas decorations tomorrow & getting into the spirit of advent.

Digidare #250

tawyn — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:54:33 +0000

This week’s digidare is all about being dressed up. We might have all been in our fancy dresses for AJ’s 30th but when it came time for the dancing, there were piles of high heels by the dancefloor. Reminds me of her wedding when all of us bridesmaids were out of our heels as soon as we could kick them off.

Credits: Paper – 3 Paper Peonies, Border – Michelle Batton, Ribbon – Scrapcop, Doodle – Cinzia Loosemore, Frame – Irene Alexeeva, Alphas – A Work in Progress & Lisbon Lioness, Font – Adler.

Digidare #249 redo

tawyn — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:23:53 +0000

I’m happier now – couldn’t get this LO out of my head standing hanging the washing listening to this weeks Digishow podcast.

Stacey’s comment on version 1 was right, I shouldn’t have left the photo tilted. I was going against all those strong verticals & horizontals – what was I thinking. I’d thought about rotating it but didn’t even test it as that is how the photographer had taken it.

Also swapped out the wordart title as being too busy and added some paint texture to the colours. Why the texture? Mondrian was generally creating his masterpieces with oil paints & tape.