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