Project #1: Blog header redo

Me, oh my.

Today's project is to work on my blog header graphic for Fisher Academy International to replace this lonely image:

It might take me a few days ;) heheh. I've read this page as a guide.

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More tutorials here on Everyday Digital Scrapbooking.
I liked this site with all the basics right in the sidebar. nice. and. easy.

Lots of free brushes here.
(but... I don't know how to use brushes yet, heheh.)

Project 365

Whoa, this in all technicalities could become a religion!

Project 365.

Take a picture a day and journal it. Simple.

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I REALLY like the idea, but I KNOW I would not keep up with it. It would have to become an obsession, a religion. Remember to take a picture, that's the easy part. But scrap it and journal it. every. single. day. That requires serious devotion.

But I do like the idea. Maybe I'll do it for a month... or a week :)

Here are some posts about it...

A great explanation for why and how HERE.

Here's one of MANY blogs about it...

Read about one guy's recap of his finished project, HERE.

Here's an awesomely cute digital scrapbook line of products for it... Gina even gives away freebies to those who are doing the current week!

Mask layers & favorites

Hahahah. This is funny. I don't know how to do ANYTHING, but I'm reading/learning about mask layers! Well, I'm determined :) And, I know that I'll want to know this someday, so I'm putting it here for later ease.

While I'm here, I'll just go ahead and mention my favorite sites so far in this new journey...

Digital-crea - is a really cool site even if it is in French, and they have a number of beautiful kits... you actually can read it in English too :) - it is also in Euros automatically, but click to convert that too. I especially like weeds and wildflowers - SO very, very nice... and expensive! At oscraps, paislee press & taylormade have some great templates, and Createwings Designs & NatashaNast have really beautiful and artistic kits. After5 designs has a regular Tips and Tricks post on their blog, which looks to be very promising. As well as some great designers. Over at designerdigitals, they have a really neat team who are all very inspirting with their VERY cool challenges, with freebies! I love their creativity and idea prompts.

But I'm not kidding, I think there are 304,982 digital scrapbooking sites all with their own crew of at least 100 people who design and scrap for them. Yikes. I do not have time for this... I cannot possibly see them all. So, soon I will choose my favorite and just not look at all the rest! I think?

Newbie links

As a total beginner, I have a feeling I will be coming back to the daily digi's page with tutorials for newbies very often! They have articles on how to choose software, using templates, making shadows, etc.

photo by Jef Bettens

Here's a whole site with tutorials of every sort, digiscrappingtutorials.com

Creating your first layout:
Here's a tutorial on creating your first layout by previously mentioned and loved Shabby Princess. Of course it is for Photoshop Elements, so get that first ;)

Tutorial using Photoshop & Photoshop Elements by Jessica Sprague. She has stuff online for free as well as a ton of online classes HERE.

Here's a post for beginners from a lady who's got really cool stuff, Ali Edwards!

Oh Happy Day... Freebies!

No, sorry. I myself am not giving anything away :) But I've found two lovely sites with LOTS of digital scrapbooking freebies! (thanks Christie, for the lead on that first one!)

>>Be careful though, freebie hunting has a way of taking over your life if you're not careful ;) <<

...speaking from experience,
there were a couple of days when I was
downloading EVERY free moment,
which is clearly out of control..

Shabby Princess - love her, she was my first lure when it came to digital scrapbooking because of her beautiful kits that she gave away for free! She's been doing this for years! She shares a new kit a couple times a year (personal use only).

[I wish she had a button or blinkie, I'd put it right here ;)]

Ikea Goddess - she scours the web and posts only the best freebies from all over the place. She posts new freebies practically every day (templates, QP - quickpages, word art, fonts, kits, samplers and addons).

O Happy Day... Fonts!

I found this site today with FREE fonts, yay! Yes, there are LOTS of sites out there with free fonts, but this one was VERY user friendly and the people over there are very nice :)
Plus, they have great taste in fonts!

Go have a look!

Resources:
A tutorial on how to use fonts in Photoshop.
Here's a tutorial on how to use cute fonts on your blog.

Open Office

I'm also looking into using this... .
This isn't directly related to digital scrapbooking, but since it has something to do with my computer work, I'm blogging it here ;). I've heard so many good things about this program. It takes up less room on the hd than the alternative word processors. It isn't microsoft. It is also supposedly able to open all .doc files and convert to .pdf right in the program! But the best part is, it's FREE! I have downloaded it, just haven't installed yet. Oh the anticipation!

I'm just so nervous about making such a big life change! MS Office is like a pair of old slippers, it's comfortable. Buying a new pair of slippers would entail a lot of wearing in and stuff... a little unfamiliar at first, but maybe OO could turn out to be a better fit after all?

Here's a tutorial for adding clip art into the program

That link there's for when I actually get the nerve up to make the switch :)

Drop Shadow effect

Alright, so last night I defrag'ed. Today, I fixed the files with errors (deleting them after copying them onto my external harddrive). It fixed the problem with the freezing (I think) on Paint.Net, but it is still SUPER slow. Too slow to work with. I went and got dressed while I waited for it to undo my last 5 actions in the history!

While I am giving this a chance and doing my best to make it work, I'm not sure how long as a beginner I'm going to give this! I'll read some on the Paint.Net website and see what I can find out - maybe my computer is too old...

I'm really anxious to learn how to do drop shadows though, so here's the tutorial I'm studying on that: Tutorial on Drop Shadows

...see how it has kind of a 3D look to it?

That's the image with a drop shadow, in the tutorial he'll show us how to make that effect!

Here's a download to automate some of the steps, forum topic here, download here. That is said as if I knew what I was talking about :) ...I don't. heheh.

There's a simpler tutorial here by Thomas Brennan on wikiHow. And yet another tutorial that is probably easy for smart people to understand, but I felt kinda lost reading it :S and you know what that says about me...

The first step...

I'll be posting my journey from absolutely ignorant digital scrapper... to not as ignorant digital scrapper ;)

"'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'" ~ Lewis Carrol

"Play is the beginning of knowledge."

~Dan Corsey

Here's my humble beginning...

• Several years ago, a friend gifted me an older version of Elements. Had trouble because I didn't have the registration number... never got around to learning the program with moving multiple times, and various pregnancies :)

• Last year for my birthday, my parents bought me the latest version of Elements, but I had my hopes set on a bundled version online, so they returned it...

• A couple of weeks ago, my brother told me about a digital scrapbooking software, I can't remember what it was called, got me thinking about it again.

• Last week, I listened to an online women's conference, A Woman Inspired. In one of the workshops we saw a basic tutorial for making blog headers... I was inspired. I have LONG been wanting to dress up my blog header a little... no time.

*fast forward to yesterday*

• I downloaded paint.net - as I'd decided I would try that one out first. It was between that and Gimp. Here's some reviews: Review #1 and Article #1. These are both kinda old, but they're what I used to get some orientation when deciding.

Oh my word. Before installing, I had decided to make room on my computer and the .NET framework for Microsoft was big and said it hadn't been used since 2006. Whatever you do, if you have this on your computer the day you are planning to install paint.net -- DON'T uninstall it!! urgh. It took several hours to download it again and then reinstall! shheeesh. I felt like a real ignoramus.

• Today, I've been playing with it a little, but talk about SLOW. I hit rotate image 90* and I have time to go have a snack and come back while it works. Frustrating. Hopefully, it's just a matter of having too much on my computer, which I will remedy in the next couple days transferring stuff to my external harddrive.

Here's a tutorial that I'm watching now on the basics of paint.net:

Tutorial

Amy