Let's Get Digital with Just Us Girls

Its time for Just Us Girls - this week it's a technique challenge and I am the hostess. I decided it was time to really have us all try some digital stuff! Digital stamps and digital scrapbooking are becoming quite popular.  Lauren Meader from My Time Made Easy is sponsoring us and she will be giving away a DIGITAL STAMP SET plus a pack of DIGITAL PAPER to one lucky participant this week. SO it would be good to play along...

Here's my project for the week.  I realize the layout is really, really simple but I'll explain all the digi action in a bit.

The card itself is mounted on Gina K 120lb pure luxury CS (love this CS) layered with Spring Rain and another layer of white.  The white layer behind the house has been embossed with the woodgrain embossing plate from PTI. It really adds some cool texture! I used my Scor-Pal to do some simple scoring on the blue layer and on the CS base layer. If you click the picture to enlarge it you will see what I mean.

Here's a closer look at the main image:

I have not played a whole lot with digital images (I really prefer "real stamping") but I've been exposed to enough of them to think it was worth doing some exploration. SO I started with one of Lauren's images (the house) from the digital set called Just For You. First thing I did was enlarge the image to almost 3". It was just a transparent house when I first started...

Then I began to play with the image in Photoshop. I wondered if I could "paper piece" a digital image. I discovered that I could, indeed do some creative paper piecing - so I used some of my favorite papers from MTME and "pieced" my little house... I also "painted" the scalloped edge of the roofline, too. Hmmm this was kind of fun (although it took me about 45 min to get this far - I had to learn as I proceeded). I will tell you that each digital paper was on a separate layer so if I messed up I didn't ruin the whole image :-)

After that I added some flowers from the same Just For You set, painted them (in Photoshop) with kind of fun colors - oh I decided I needed the bird, too.  I was now to here:

Each flower is on its own layer as is the bird. I ended up with 10 layers total in my Photoshop file!! If you look closely you will see that I added a DROP SHADOW to each flower and the bird to give them more depth and dimension and to appear "popped up".  Last thing I did to the image was to add my sentiment text right on the house since I wasn't sure if there would be room on the card when I was done.  I simply added a text layer in PS and typed the words Welcome Home and placed the text just above the door - I used the arched text tool to make the words arc slightly over the door.  Ok - I finally had my image complete. It was very rewarding to be able to figure out all the steps along the way and yet to have a card that LOOKS like lots of layering that's not at all. Once I printed my image, I cut out the house, colored the windows with a soft yellow to look like a light shining in the window,  then mounted it to the rest of my card with some dimensionals.

You will notice from my screen shots above that the color on my screen was more "teal" than the card - that's the color change that happened between what I saw on my SCREEN and what printed on my PRINTER! (ACK!) I didn't have time to do any color tweaking but I could have if I really needed to.

SO - I spent about 2 hours playing with digital images and layers and Photoshop - You could do the same things with Gimp which is FREE photo editing software.  It took me way longer than a "normal" card would have BUT I learned a LOT along the way. I will surely visit digital "stuff" more often after this -

I HOPE you will all TRY some digital image stuff - it CAN be frustrating if you don't know what to do but really, it's a lot easier than you might think - Even if you just use a digi image and RESIZE it you'll find some real value in that ability.

Be sure to pop over to the rest of the team and see their creations - their cards and layouts are WAY better than this simple layout - I devoted most of my time this week to learning more about digital and left too little time for a fancy layout.

Now - before I go I must bid a FOND FAREWELL to my teammate and fellow JUGS gal, Mona. This will be Mona's last JUGS challenge as a DT girl - she is already way committed with other things on her plate and she will also be exploring new options and avenues. I will miss her dearly - I love her shabby chic vintage style and she was SO good about commenting and leaving a little love - be sure to stop be her blog and leave her a few good wishes. All the best to you Mona, my friend! :-(

Thanks for stopping by and putting up with all my blabbering on :-0 Tomorrow is the next wedding dress fitting - it's getting closer now - I need to have my own Mother of the Bride dress altered too - better get on that.

Have a lovely weekend.
Hugs n Smiles.