Latest cards - aging photos etc.

 This first card is from one of my own photos.  It is Archway House in Sherwood Forest, and it was a full colour photo.  I changed it to sepia (well, the program calls the colour tan - sepia was too bright), using Roxio Photosuite.  I printed it on to watercolour card, and then aged it further with Tim Holtz Ranger Distress Old Paper.  Apart from rubbing round the edges with the cut and dry foam, I also put a random light coating over most of the picture to make sure it did not look too new.  The coppery card it is mounted on is from the PDA Majestic and Stardream range - beautiful quality card and a joy to work with.

This second card was treated in the same way, and I think the steam engine fits this technique perfectly.  In this case, the topper is mounted on dark brown pearlescent card from PDA, and then onto a dark olive green card from the same range, which has a slight hint of gold in it too.

Both these cards were for birthday cards for friends, the second of which is a real steam enthusiast, so his picture is of a Great Western engine on the famous Lickey Incline, near to where we live.

I do like using my own photos where possible and altering them to create something different.  In fact, I am off now to have a real play, both with photos and with some brayering practice.  Have a lovely day, all of you.

Manipulating images

One minor gripe I have with My Craft Studio is that it does not handle pdf files.  This may not sound very interesting but when you have a lot of discs where all the images are in pdf form and you want to manipulate one of them to create a different format, it can be irritating.

I have got round this problem using another program to convert the pdf to jpg format.  For this card, I took the image and the insert from the latest Joanna Sheen / Pamela West CD, and copied them into Roxio Photosuite, then saved them as jpg's (make sure you know where you have saved them to on your computer - you can waste hours trying to find missing images).  From there, I was able to then take them into My Craft Studio, and resize them to suit my needs.  The image on the front is as designed by Pamela West, cut out and mounted onto holographic card, and then onto the backing paper.  The insert was resized to fit the card I had, then I digitally punched out an oval, into which I put the text.  With My Craft Studio, you can match the colour of your text to any part of your design.  I picked the darkest part of the twigs, and then darkened the text a little from that to make it stand out but still tone in well.  To get the sentiment strip across the front of the card, I cropped the insert to keep just the section with the vertical lines, then turned them through 90 degrees to go across.  I found that I could not get the text to show up satisfactorily on that background, so I went back to the insert and cropped out a small section of the main background, and digitally placed that on top of the strip with the lines, put the text on top of that and printed it as one complete image.  Both the image and the sentiment strip were mounted on the card with narrow shaker tape to give some dimension.  This card was to be given by hand so I used the thicker shaker tape, but if it was to be posted, you could use the thinner tape, or just design the whole thing digitally and print it out as a flat design.  I did this initially to assess if the end result would be as I wanted.  Doing it on the computer first saves using expensive ink printing things you really don't want in the end.

 I thought this particular design from Pamela West was a good one for a male card, always a problem to sort out, especially if your subject is not too keen on sports or cars.

Using what you have

This is an anniversary card I made for friends who spend a large part of their year touring with their caravan and with Land Rovers.  The advert on the front was found on the internet, and I just aged it a little with distress inks round the edge.  Then I found an old black and white image of a trip to Europe by the Land Rover Club, changed it to sepia, mounted the advert on that and then mounted the whole thing on a hammered card, which I also aged with the same distress ink.  The insert was also the same photo, turned to sepia, with a section digitally cut out to add the text.  The program I used to manipulate the images was Roxio Photosuite, but I would probably use My Craft Studio now, which enables you to match the colour of the text exactly to bring everything together.