The Cherry on Top!
Lisa, the designer also known as The Cherry on Top, didn’t have time to sit for an interview so she instead sent me a little bio. Here she is in her own words:
Lisa-Lisa here, from The Cherry On Top.
I grew up State side, where I worked as a teacher. What a wonderful job to have. I often found myself underwhelmed by the typical curriculum and so I created a lot of my own, more visually appealing activity sheets and encouraged the kids to also show more creativity in their work. History can be pretty boring for most. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that even teenagers liked to construct scrapbooks to show off their knowledge of historical events. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was actually “designing” digitally. I had next to no program or computer experience. I even struggled learning how to do e-mail. Ha!
I originally started scrapbooking traditionally and took those skills with me, over the pond, to Belgium, where I presently reside. I wanted to make something that I couldn’t find anywhere in paper format. So, I scoured the internet looking for images and “pieced” together exactly what I needed. Funnily enough, I thought I invented digital scrapbooking, until I stumbled across the digital scrapbooking world.
I dove in the deep end! After a couple of months, I was on a praise team at Scrap Take Out where I met a lot of fantastic designers like Fran B and Amanda from A-Manda Creation. Slowly, I worked myself on to Creative Teams. At one point, I was on 28 teams. Talk about a junky! Ironically, I despised templates. I still cannot get over the grudge I had against them. Until I realized what a wonderful starting point or catalyst they can be. Especially, when your mojo is low or the inspiration just isn’t there. Now, they are my passion.
I find ideas for templates, everywhere. In an advertisement, greeting card, sketch, nature…I’m always coming up with new ideas, techniques and I make designing unique, easy to use templates my main objective. They truly are a wonderful tool and certainly an excellent way to learn how to digital scrapbook. They save so much time, too.
I started off using PowerPoint to scrapbook. I know, right?! Then I moved to My Memories for a few years and then Photoshop Elements. I still mostly use Elements. It is incredibly user friendly and perfect for designing templates, for the most part. Occasionally, I jump over to PS when PSE doesn’t offer a particular function I need and I’m pretty sure, that one of these days I’ll morph over to PS, but I still have so much to learn in PSE.
I do design a lot of other products besides templates, but templates are still my favorite.
Thanks for letting us get a peek into your creative process Lisa! Ladies, don’t forget that Lisa‘s also presenting the Daily Download this month. And she has a $2 coupon for her GingerScraps store (linked above in pink): the code is tcotspotlight.
See you again soon!
