Music to play by

I really do seem to have caught the blogging bug.  This is my 4th Post.

Anyway I was reading the other day about what types of music everyone does art with.  My choices are Spotify, Pandora or my own playlist.  In terms of the type of music, most of the time I listen to classical music but sometimes the walls and windows vibrate with the volume turned up to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and other classic rock performers and bands.  Also I listen a lot to the big band sound that my parents absolutely loved and sometimes blues.  Funny how my mood tends to dictate what I am going to listen to on any day.  

The only downside of listening to music all the time is that whatever I am listening to stays in my mind for several hours after I have stopped listening.  On the odd occasion I do find myself turning on my music to the same song or piece that I turned off earlier.  I am hoping that you will all add comments here to let me know what you are listening to and also make recommendations so that I can enjoy your music as well.

So I wanted to make a quick photo manipulation tutorial about vignettes.  Open up the base image and make a duplicate layer.

Grab the elliptical marquee tool and make a selection of the part of the photo you want to use.  Right click within the selection and select feather from the menu.  A new dialog box opens and you need to set the feather radius to around 20 and hit OK.

Next you are going to choose select>inverse and what you will see is marching ants around your marquee selection AND around the edge of the entire image.  Hit the delete key and everything except your marquee selection will vanish like magic.

Make a new layer and move it to below your feathered selection (the pic above).  Using the eyedropper tool pick up a color from within the photo and left click once.  That will make your color selection active in the foreground chip. Fill the selected blank layer with your selected color.

At this point I thought it would be really cool to vignette my lovely couple with some flowers so I found a photo of some daisies and opened it up!

At this point all you have to do is drag the flowers onto the color filled vignette layer and you are done!!

Here is the final image.

Enjoy!

OK so yesterday was my first time blogging in public!  I do hope that everyone liked what I did and am looking forward to doing some more now.

Also I wanted to thank everyone for their comments and love on the blog today when the blog hop went live.

Today I thought I would add a photo to the layout I made yesterday to show how the layout can be used.

Here it is:

Enjoy.

Club Scrap Monthly Digital Page Swap

For years now I have been participating in the monthly digital page swap and as a result have built up a wonderful library of ready made digital swap pages.

This month I thought that I would write a blog about how to make a digital swap page or plopper.

What you do is start with a blank layer (transparent).  I make mine 12" x 12" at 300ppi.  Then drag a background paper onto this layer.  At this point I usually create the "hole" for a photo.  In this case a rectangle.  To do this use the rectangle selection tool and make the rectangle which shows up as a shape outlined by marching ants.  Then go to edit>cut and enter and voila - you have your place for your photo.

Then you can add to your hearts content.  My layout with Club Scrap's beautiful Take Wing Collection has a horizontal gradient tint layer added and a couple of embellishments and a word stamp.

The Take Wing digital kit can be found at http://www.clubscrapdigital.com/store/p/2777-Take-Wing-September-2013-Digital-Kit.aspx#.UkGJfIashcY

Enjoy.

Thanks for visiting my blog today! Your next stop on the Blog Hop

	http://clubscrapcreates.blogspot.com/