Month: December 2010

Behind the Scenes: Making a Template Your Own

Published by Sula H.

Lots of people love to use templates. Layered templates are easy to use and they help you to quickly get a page together that is guaranteed to look good (or at least as good as the template you chose). I like templates, too, though I don’t use them too often, simply because I like my pages to look different than other people’s. However, there are lots of possibilities of how you can make a template really your own! Here’s What I Did I used a template from EH Studio’s template set “Moments in the Morning” (available at OTS). Here you can see all the templates, and I used the one in the lower left corner. So, after opening the template in photoshop, the first thing I did was rotate it. Now the photo cluster ended up to the left. I clipped my photo papers to the masks, but I also added a few more papers, and then several layers of embellishments (flowers, leaves, etc. I love clustering, have you ever noticed?) Scatters always help to …

Weekend Trip

Published by Sula H.

I just got back from a weekend out of town (no time to keep up-to-date with my website), but I’ll post a report (with pictures) about it soon, and as for today’s Word of Wisdom – it’ll have to wait another day or two for that. Right now I’m tired and ready to go to bed. Good night everyone!

CT Spotlight (12/11)

Published by Sula H.

Time for this week’s CT spotlight and today I’d like to start with Libby Pritchett’s “2 Thumbs Up” – a movie themed collaboration kit she whipped up together with Penny Springmann (both SSD). And Darcy Baldwin has a new Marshmellow Alpha out, as well as her new fonts: Tara Writes.

Saturday Feature: My Little Christmas Tree

Published by Sula H.

It all started a couple of years ago: I won one of four Christmas trees the International Housing Department of our school distributes every year through a raffle. Before that I had never even thought of getting a Christmas tree. Now that I had one for the season (we would have to return them after Christmas so they could be used again the following year), I realized I was in need of some decoration. So I went to the city in search for some nice ornaments. Now, those of you who don’t live in China need to know that there’s only one kind of Christmas decoration available here: the sparkly, glittery kind (not exactly my style). However, a Christmas tree without ornaments is an even sadder thing to behold. So I just bought what I found in the spur of the moment. Well, the following year, I decided to be a little more organized. Not wanting to depend on a raffle again, I got my own tree, plus a box full of ornaments. And this …

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DIY: Christmas Card No. 3

Published by Sula H.

There’s still time to send out those little Christmas greetings, so let me show you another one of my Christmas cards and what I did to create it: The card comes with five parts – two background mats, two center-piece mats and a ribbon. Simple enough, right? I used four different kinds of papers – one patterned one, and the other three ones are plain solid colored. Now, what’s special about this card is that the top layered mat has a lot of writing on it – all words that have to do with Christmas. So, while it took me some time to brainstorm all the different terms, assembling them wasn’t all that hard. Simply pick a lot of different fun fonts and arrange them on the mat until there is no more space left. The trick is: re-size. You can make some words big and bold, others can be quite small. That way arranging everything is a relatively simple task. Once you’ve clipped all the papers and finished arranging the wordart, you can prepare …

Around Town: Shopping on Campus

Published by Sula H.

Christmas is always a good time for giving and sharing with others what we received. Now, we have a club on campus that supports orphans in our area. It’s a great opportunity for students to get involved in a charity project (they usually have very little exposure to anything like that). Every year for Christmas the club organizes the “Christmas in a Box” project where they collect boxes with goodies to give to the children in those orphanages. This year, instead of boxes, they use red bags. So, the other day I took some of my own students out shopping to fill my bags with goodies for some of the orphans. It was the first time for my students to do anything like that. The goal was to get something useful as well as something fun. So we went on a tour through some of the shops on campus, and look what we found:

Enable Me: Shadows

Published by Sula H.

Everyone always wants to know about shadows as this is one area where we all want to improve all the time. There are lots of tutorials out that show you how to create great shadows, and one of my favorite tutorials ever is Megan Turnidge’s “Shadows in Photoshop CS4” tutorial on her blog. It comes with free downloadable styles that I installed in my PS and ever since then, my shadowing has improved a lot. Of course, her shadows only serve as a guideline for me now, and I always adjust them a little to fit my layout, but they serve as a great starting point, though they come in a rather unusual angle (-44°). However, I started using this angle and love it altogether! Check out Megan’s tutorial, and don’t forget to leave her some love!