Train boy

One of my absolute favourite images of Angus at the moment. How he loves his trains, funny little thing!

Watercolours

Yesterday I had the gorgeous pleasure of taking a watercolour class with an artist, Alan Louis. It was an all day class held at my daughter's kindy, which is a tranquil spot overlooking a valley of trees. Oh, bliss! The image above is my masterpiece - it's meant to be two trees reflected in water. "Technique, technique," Alan would say encouragingly, when I despaired my trees looked more like an octupus. Or maybe pink flamingoes.

He suggested I could cut out the middle and call it "Pink Flamingoes"!

The main thing I took away from this class was the idea of what Alan called values. So, when you start with a colour - say blue, and blot it straight on the page, that's a 5. You add water, to make it a 4, and so on, until you get to 1, which is a "wash". "Values, values, values," he'd say, if we moaned about how terrible our shapes were looking! He was such a generous teacher. And funny! You can see some of his incredible work here.

The Energiser Bunny

Aahh... finally I managed to sit down last night and do a fun scrap page! I just grabbed whatever was close to hand and I had this recent photo of Tas doing her thing, madly racing around, singing, bouncing on the couch. I decided to make my own Tim-Holtz style tissue tape, by covering an A4 thick (80 GSM) page with crafters masking tape, then printing some images of text on top. I love love love the effect of this. I'm going to have to use it on ALL my pages!

Sharmaine... keep an eye on the postie, there's some coming your way!!!

Two years ago

playing with actions

I'm a few weeks behind in my beloved 365 (daily photo) project. The photots are all there, but not all uploaded/photoshopped/printed. Now that I've sat down and completed a week, and played with some exciting new Coffee Shop actions, I thought I'd share my faves from a weekend back in September.

Attic Vintage action

Attic Vintage

2 minute makeover and levels adjustment

Attic vintage and texture overlay

Nearly every time I sit and play with Photoshop Elements I seem to learn something new. Today I discovered that you can isolate any part of the image and adjust the levels for colour/shadow/midtones and highlights. So, if you have a face in shadow but the rest of the image is fine, you can fix it quickly in a few seconds. I wish I'd know that before!! At this rate, I may be ready for Photoshop sooner than I thought. On the other hand, I've heard the full version is very expensive.

How do you manage your photos?