Cottage Arts

Accomplished photographer and friend, Jonathan Kingston, just released a fabulous training DVD at Software Cinema for Adobe Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Basics & Beyond, geared especially for photographers. He's offering our readers four full-length free videos from the DVD so you can see his teaching style and content, as well as a coupon code off the regular price. See end of post for links to the free videos and coupon code. I met Jonathan two years ago at a photography seminar in Molokai, Rekindling the Creative Spirit, where I assisted teaching PC users. Jonathan was the Mac, Photoshop, and Lightroom...

Have scrapbooks replaced your diary? Rejoice...don’t feel guilty. My parents bought me a hard-covered journal for Christmas when I was seven-years-old. I journaled almost everyday from that time until I was eighteen. With adulthood I outgrew the desire to keep it up. I no longer write in a journal or diary on a daily basis. I scrapbook. Scrapbooks probably paint a better picture of our lives than a journal, anyway. But what about all those thoughts and feelings that we normally record in those private books? I try to scrapbook those as well. Below is a layout that I created...

Below is a fun digital download freebie used in today's earlier perspective tutorial. The freebie includes a whimsical poem from Thena Smith and some springy 3D title art, with and without shadows. You can see more poetry by Thena and our entire word art collection here. Enjoy!      

Hi everyone! Stopping in for another perspective tutorial...this one offering some little tips on blending the image into a background and on using props. Here's the page:   Supplies: Off the Beaten Path 3 Papers, Nature's Sketchbook Elements 2, Soldered Sentiments 2, Adventure Pak (caterpillar) Simply Spring Scrap.Words (ladybug), Blog Freebie (title and quote) Here's how the image started out: My niece would have blended nicely into the grassy floor of the chosen background, but I wanted even more believability. To accomplish this, I first dragged the image of my niece onto the background (Birch Forest from Off the Beaten...

Now on to the Perspective Tutorial I promised Friday! You may want to refer back to that post for key elements in a successful perspective layout. Here, again, is the finished layoutSupplies: Off the Beaten Path Papers 2, Destination Page Pak, Nature's Sketchbook Elements 3 - Think Spring,, Water Tiles AlphaSet; Font: Times New Roman This page uses a scanned image from 1971 of my husband's family at their lake cabin. Every time I talk about scanning I make a reminder to be sure to scan images in at a very high resolution, as most scanners default to 200 dpi....