CS Blog Hop December 2015 - Navigation

It's that time of the month again.  This month I am doing something extremely special for someone extremely special.

This is by way of a major shout out to Karen who is totally tireless in her administration of the Club Scrap Blog and the monthly Blog Hop.  So Karen, stand up and take a bow!

I came across this photo on facebook a day or two ago and thought what an absolutely adorable photo and what can I do to bring it back to life?

After a couple of hours of playing around with this, I came up with this version.  Karen I really hope you like what I did.

Now I opened up everything that came with Navigation in my Bridge.

I hope you can see from the colors in the thumbnails that this kit lends itself really well to my restored version of the photo.  So I immediately opened up a new file 12" x 12" on a transparent background at 300 ppi. I also pulled in the restored photo.

I have added some bokeh style scatters and placed the restored photo on top of the scatters.  Now I am going back to the bridge to select the papers I want to use.

Tinker around time to see what looks best.  Back in a minute with what I ended up with!

I think you can also see that I have made each layer have a style and created a frame effect with the photo using strokes.  At this point, I went ahead and pulled in a bow and one of the cut-aparts to use on this layout.

I am going to go ahead and change the color of the cut-apart a bit so that it matches up a bit better with the rest of the layout.  Also I moved the bow so it looks like it attaches the cut-apart to the layout.

I really don't think this layout needs anything else except to resize the bow.

Hopefully our very own and wonderful Karen does not mind what I have done here and also does not mind that I have posted this without her permission.  I will of course email Karen with a hi-resolution version of the layout and the restored version of the photo that originally came off Facebook.

I also wanted to take this opportunity of wishing each and every one of you a wonderful, healthy and happy 2016.

Your next stop is:

http://capecodscrapper.blogspot.com/2015/12/club-scrap-navigation-blog-hop.html

Club Scrap Blog Hop for 2015 Watercolor Christmas

Hello all

Just wanted to thank all of you who left me some love in November.  Your comments are all much appreciated.

Now on to this wonderful special release kit.  As soon as I saw the paper version of this kit I got online in the forum to ask for it in digital form and lo and behold a few days later it appeared!  Thank you to CS for yet again hearing our requests.

I was wondering if there would be a blog hop for this magnificent special kit and I did see that our very own Julie not only put a note in the forum for sign ups but also on Facebook so needless to say I signed up to participate in both places.

So lets make a start.

As always open up a blank canvas 12" x 12" with transparent background at 300 ppi.

With such a glorious kit, I though I would fiddle around a bit with a more art journal style of page with a view to printing and framing or having made into a canvas wrap by the pro-lab I use.  To that end, I opened up my Adobe Bridge and found a file called Digital Template Components and opened that up.  Below is just a tiny part of this particular folder.

This particular folder has thousands of shapes which I can use to make up templates.  I have gone ahead and opened a bunch of different ones to see what kind of inspiration comes.

You can probably see that I have opened up all different kinds of shapes and included some text also.

Now go back to the bridge and open up watercolor christmas.

Even though I actually save my papers in one folder, and my extras in another and so on, by just typing in 2015Christmas into the search box in my bridge I can pull the whole kit together from there.

OK - now you can see that I have pulled in a whole bunch of layers and components, masks and other shapes to make a fairly artsy template to use with the backgrounds and goodies from this totally gorgeous kit.  You can see that I have already gotten carried away in my layout.  I had meant to take several more snapshots so you could see the layer building process but now I am already near to doing some pattern and texture things to add depth.

Now I have totally changed my mind about the lace border and the bird sitting on it so those two elements have now gone and been replaced by what you see below.

I did actually use a couple of photos of my own Christmas tree but since there are so many layers you can barely see them so here they are.

The pictures are from my newly reset phone but since I did not need a whole lot of sharpness or clarity they were OK.  The bird is sitting on the round ornament from the photo on the right.  I always have loads of fun doing blog posts simply because my creative process almost NEVER ends with what I envisaged.

I do hope that you all have an absolutely wonderful Christmas if you celebrate that.

Your next stop is:

http://masculineinspirationsinpapercrafts.blogspot.com/2015/12/club-scrap-watercolor-christmas-blog-hop.html