Tempus Fugit

Sea You Baby Collection Invite Mockup

A little over 12 years ago I was sending out baby boy birth announcements.  Today, he gets on the bus to go to Jr. High.  The time flies way too fast!

Paisley of the Week! Make it Yerself!

Who would think that a metal bucket could be this much fun? 

At The MacBeth Collection you can pick a tub, vase, tray, bucket, caddy and then choose a (paisley of course) design to make it super cute!  They have metal containers, flip flops, desk accessories, big wall letters and more.  I wonder if they're looking for artists to license?

Mock Journal Tutorial

Journal Mockup Tutorial.

You will need Photoshop (or a similar program) and a good working knowledge of how to use it to do this tutorial.

I had a lot of fun doing this mockup and I was very pleased with my results. Many of the companies to whom I've been submitting my designs make fancy journals so a mockup of a nice journal seemed appropriate.

1. Open a new 8 x 10 300 dpi document in Photoshop and name it "Mockup Journal."  Add a new layer and make a rectangle with rounded corners.

2. With your marquee tool, square up the left side so that it has sharp corners.

3. Duplicate this layer, close the 'eye' to make it invisible and then switch back to the original layer. Click on the little checkerboard square up in the top of the layers palette to lock your shape.

4. In your underneath color picker, choose a papery sort of color like a very light tan. Hit ctrl >backspace to fill the shape.  Change your upper color picker to a shade slightly grayer than your paper color to outline your page edges. Go into edit>stroke> and choose 5 pixels for the size and 'inside' for where you want your line and hit 'enter.'

5. Now here comes the fun part, making some pages for your journal! Choose and capture your paper shape with the marquee tool. Then, with the shape still captured, in the tools palette change it to the wand. 

6. Simulaneously hit ctrl>shift>alt> and the Up arrow key. Look what happens! PS makes a duplicate of your shape and piles it on top of the first one. To make the perspective a bit better you'll want to move the shape over while it's still selected. Hit 'V' and move it over.

7. Repeat step 7 until you have a nice stack of pages.

8. Let's make our paper look like it's been read a few times. Go into your Filter palette. Choose Filter>Distort>Pinch. Set your slider to the left at about -25% and click 'OK.' Now our paper stack looks a little less rigid.  With the burn tool, shade the pages on the sides a bit to add some shadows, especially on the corners.

10. Turn your 'cover' layer back on  then choose a pattern for it. If you have repeating tiles saved in your patterns palette you can just pour it in with the bucket tool. Or, you can open and drag your design into a new layer above your cover shape and then trim it to fit using the wand tool in the layer below.  Line it up over your pages.

11. Go down to the lower left corner of your journal and, with the pen tool, make a curved line around the edges of your pages to make it look like book binding. Go into the pages layer and shade them a bit where the binding would make a shadow.

12. Create a new layer and name it 'strap.'  With the marquee tool make a long skinny rectangle. Choose a complimentary color with your underneath color picker, then hit ctrl>backspace to fill it. Click the little checkerboad in the top of the layers palette to lock it.

13. With your pen tool make a few vertical lines through it in a darker shade. Trim off the edges so they're flush with your cover and use the burn tool at the ends for shadowing.

14. Create a new layer and with the round marquee tool, make an oval. Hit ctrl>backspace to fill it with the color of your choice and and in the layers palette choose layer>style>bevel & emboss.

17.  Choose some text or a monogram, center it over the oval and you're done! 

Now you're ready to wow stationery companies with your designs. Thanks for reading!

Guess the Paisley of the Week!

I love this paisley watch by GUESS.  I want this watch.  Anyone out there who wants to buy me this watch please feel free.  It's available at Macy's....

Still not too early... I think.

Making Mockups is almost as fun as sewing real clothes.  Wouldn't you love to have a party dress like this for your daughter?  I would too.  I just can't decide which one  I like best. 

Paisley of the Week! Not Too Early - no, really!

There's no time like the present to get going on your holiday stuff.  Here are two of the same paisley with two different feels to them.  Halloween and Christmas.  I'm partial to the Halloween one.

Both of these designs were born out of this one doodle.  I left off the fussy bits around the edge because it looked less cluttered with the design.

The cure for Slooow Mo Joe

Lately, my computer has been super slooooooww. I've been worried that it was a virus although my anti-virus hasn't noticed anything. Photoshop has been particularly troublesome starting out a bit pokey and ending up taking up to FIVE minutes to load. I'd turn it on, get a drink, unload the dishwasher, allow myself to be distracted by the TV for a bit, come back and it'd still be trying to get it self started. And shutting down was the same story. About five minutes to close and any other program I wanted to run just had to wait.

Yesterday morning I was not quite awake, so while waiting for my coffee to take effect I sat there sipping and absently watching it load. It started out going through all of its photoshoppy things and then it got to the part where it loads the patterns and there it stuck....reading patterns.....reading patterns.....reading patterns. It read them for a full three minutes and then *click* the lightbulb went on (I said I wasn't awake yet.)

All of the patterns that I've been creating, I've just saved in the patterns pallette. I must've had about fifty of them in there. Apparently instead of just using them as I need them, Photoshop loads them all. It would be like taking out every piece of fabric you own, unfolding it and lining it up all around your sewing room whether you were going to use it or not. Then, when you were done with your project, you'd have to fold all of it back up and put it away again exactly as you found it.

So the moral of this story is: If you've used my repeating pattern tutorial, and subsequently noticed a slow down in your Photoshop, go into your patterns pallette and reset it (but make sure you have your tiles all saved somewhere else.) After I did this BAM, Photoshop closed itself right down.  For the sake of experimentation I restarted it and it took less than a minute to start. And my laptop began running faster as well. Who knew that having a full pattern pallette could cause such a problem?

A Pack of Wet Papers

The watery scrapbook paper pack that I've been working on is now in my Etsy store.  You always need watery looking backgrounds for those pics at the beach, pool and other summer fun.  I loved the challenge of creating nine different water designs and thinking about all of the forms that water takes, waves, bubbles, foam and that's just a few. 

This one is my favorite.  I am sure that you can guess why ;)

Paisley of the Week! Strawberry Swirl

This week's paisley is one of my own.  It is called Strawberry Swirl because it reminds me of sherbet or sorbet (one of those frozen 'bets' anyway.)  Last post was called Italian Ice, this one's a sorbet -- can you tell it's been HOT?  Anyway, this paisley is one of my traditionally drawn designs that has been mirror repeated.  I've been working on some new collections that revolve around hand drawn work. 

Cool Off With Italian Ice!

I've been working on a set of watery background papers for my Etsy Shop (they'll be up soon!) and this one, while I totally LOVE it, didn't quite go with the feel of others.  I designed it after a particularly sweltering day when we'd all enjoyed a box of Luigi's Watemelon and Blue Raspberry Ices after dinner.  As everyone knows, treats are better when shared so I am sharing this wallpaper with you. It will tile so you may use it as a desktop, Twitter or MySpace background.  Enjoy and stay cool.

Paisley of the Week! Slumber Party Style

I.  Love.  This.

When I went to slumber parties, hundreds of years ago, just about everybody's sleeping bag was navy blue or dark green.   Once in a while you'd see some lucky girl whose bag was red. Everybody's bag was lined with ugly polyester wannabe plaid flannel.  Thems was your choices.  Then, when my kids were old enough to have sleeping bags of their own there were cooler choices like Scooby Doo or Dora the Explorer to be had and they're fun but ...  This adorable chocolate and paisley sleeping bag, with matching pillow case, from PB Teen is just excellent.  Carrie, whoever she is, is going to be the envy of everybody else at the slumber party.  I hope they don't put her bra in the freezer out of jealousy.