Archives for February 2020

Is Exhaustion a Thing?

Well, last week was a total whirlwind! It still feels a lot like a dream, but we now own a beautiful new house in a surreal setting, even though we’re not moving into it until early May. The trip itself was pretty exhausting, both mentally and physically. Somehow we got to the airport without our son’s photo ID, without which he couldn’t board the plane. (We live 30 miles away, on the other side of a major city…) The airline was amazing and got us on a later flight so I could run home and get it. We ended up getting there 5 hours later than originally planned, but in the end that was fine. All the things that needed to happen to get us into the house happened, and I’m planning and scheming every minute of the day. All of this is leading up to me apologizing for not having a tutorial for you today, but in its place I’m going to give you a sneak peak at some of the photos you’ll see in my layouts in the coming weeks. And then I have a couple of little challenges for y’all.

What do you think??

Okay. Your first challenge is to find one of your layouts where you’ve used something you learned from Tutorial Tuesday and send me a private message (JaninAlberta) with a link to it. Don’t tell me what you did, I’m going to see if I can figure it out! Next week I’ll compile all the layouts I get from you into a blog post and share your successes with everybody else.

Your second challenge is to help me come up with a new user name. When we move, I’ll no longer be Jan in Alberta… I’ll still be Jan, but living in Kelowna, British Columbia. Ginger has told me I can change my user name when the time comes and I’d like it to be a bit more creative! Help?

Have a great week!

Effect? Affect? What’s the Difference?

Today’s tutorial has some common elements with last week’s. I’m going to show you how to turn a photo into a work of art, and to blend it into a layout. But that’s where the similarities end! I played around for quite awhile before I got the look I was after, but lucky for you, I kept track of what I did so you can skip the experimentation and go right to the good part.

There are so many ways to make Photoshop Elements do fantastic things. I first played with the Filter Gallery, but didn’t get what I wanted. So then I started looking at the Effects Gallery. There’s where I found the pot of gold.

First I made a copy layer of my photo. (I actually tried to work right on the background photo layer but didn’t like where I ended up – no control!)

Then I clicked on the Effects button down at the bottom right of the work space. From the Effects Gallery I chose Vintage and then Pencil Sketch. (Yes, I’ve done a couple of sketch tutorials before, but this one is different. And a lot easier!)

One click and this is where I went.

Elements has created another Copy layer and then added the Sketch effect to yet another separate layer.

I tried out each of the Blend Modes until I found one I liked – Hard Light. It brought back some of the colour but kept the sketchy look.

I made another copy, of the very topmost layer and it lightened up the image and blew out some highlights.

Blend Mode change to the rescue! I changed it to Multiply, and got a really arty looking image. I Merged all the layers and saved my new image as Sketch Edit.

I don’t think anybody can guess what I did when I added the Sketch Edit copy of the photo to this blended template from Heartstrings Scrap Art. I decided to try some Blend Modes and settled on Luminosity. I love how it turned out.

I hope you’re having as much fun as I am when you try my techniques. But I feel it’s only fair that I let you know I may be MIA a bit in the next while. We’re closing on our brand-new house (in another province) next Tuesday!! It’s been a long haul since we signed the construction contract, and in some ways it feels a little surreal now that it’s finally done. We’ll be out of town tying up all those loose ends next week but I’ll try to have something for you for the following week… even if it’s just photos of the new house. We won’t be moving for a few weeks yet, and I’ll make sure you have a heads-up for that. Thank you for supporting me in this amazing hobby we share!