theBlog @reneepearson.com
Tiffany Tillman’s Scraphic Design Core is Back!
What happens when you marry graphic design principles with scrapbooking? You create the Scraphic Design process, a set of steps beginning with blank canvas and finishing with a kick-butt, completed page using your polished design sense. Once you know the whys and hows of this process, you can adapt it to fit your crafting style.
Rejoin Tiffany Tillman for Core, the second part of the Scraphic Design series. For an additional four weeks, add the complexities of layering, color usage, pattern alchemy, element addition, text work and realistic shadowing to the journey. Class concludes with a final critique of your finished class assignments.
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Scraphic Design | Foundations + Seat Giveaway
Tiffany Tillman’s popular design class Scraphic Design: Foundations, where “sweet scrapbooking meets modern graphic design,” is back!
What happens when you marry graphic design principles with scrapbooking? You create the Scraphic Design process, a set of steps beginning with blank canvas and finishing with a kick-butt, completed page using your polished design sense. Once you know the whys and hows of this process, you can adapt it to fit your crafting style.
Join Tiffany in the first of her two-part design series, Scraphic Design: Foundations. You’ll take a journey into the design process beginning with creative inspiration, sketching techniques, the major principles of design, dynamic page structure and finally end with individual, personalized critiques.
Enroll before March 19th and take advantage of the $10 discount early bird pricing.
Tiffany’s Seat Giveaway
Throw your hat in the ring! Tiffany’s giving away a complimentary seat in Scraphic Design: Foundations. Register to enter at her blog. The giveaway ends on Friday night, so hurry!
Good luck!
Friday’s Freebie: March Calendar Wallpaper
It’s time to replace your wallpaper with a lovely March calendar from Smashing Magazine. There are 20 this month…all free.
My picks:
Cookie Fun (above)
Designed by Pietje Precies from The Netherlands.
The Golden Eyed Cat
Designed by Omer Faruk Ayranci from Turkey.
Hello Spring
Designed by Forsaken from France.
Canoe By The Lake
Designed by Virginia Saint from USA.
It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!
New! Building Color Confidence with Cilenia Curtis
Creating artistic color themes from scratch
Ready to get your colors on? Color is Cilenia Curtis’ first love! It’s what influences her in choosing how she scraps, how she decorates her home, creates quilts, and many other things that surround her in her everyday life.
In Building Color Confidence, a 3-week class, Cilenia will help you learn to confidently work with color, no matter what kind of project you want to create. She’ll give you the tools and knowledge you need to choose colors confidently, so you can mix and match your digital stash while creating layouts and art.
Meet Cilenia Curtis
Cilenia Curtis has been teaching computer-aided graphics professionally for over 20 years, both privately and within the companies she has worked for. She chose to put all that aside 3 years ago to pursue her own dream of owning her own business, pouring herself into her art and sharing with others the passion she feels when she creates.
Cilenia lives on the edge of the Mojave Desert and Mount Charleston located just on the outskirts of Las Vegas, NV and loves the exquisite beauty that is ever-changing between these two extreme seasonal environments. Her dream is to share her love of art and inspire others to find their inner artist by helping them see deeper into the beauty found in our everyday lives. She firmly believes there is an artist lurking in all of us, and we only need to believe it to release it.
Join instructor Cilenia Curtis in a live video chat Monday March 5 at 9pm ET on ReneeTV, where she will preview Building Color Confidence and answer any questions you may have on her class. We’ll see you there.
Introducing Adobe Illustrator Essentials
Learn Adobe Illustrator with Laura Coyle!
Here at ReneePearson.com we’re delighted to offer some of the best and most affordable Illustrator training on the web, taught by our own highly rated instructor, Laura Coyle. If learning Illustrator has ever seemed like an uphill challenge, Laura is here to make it attainable and fun.
Laura Coyle has worked for over 15 years as a freelance Illustrator, lending her individual style to everything from big-name magazines to game boards and gift wrap. Throughout her career, Adobe Illustrator has been her most essential creative tool. Our students tell us time and again that Laura presents Illustrator in a thorough, logical and organized way that helps them to really understand the process of creating vector artwork in Illustrator.
Our Illustrator Essentials Bundle is a complete course in Adobe Illustrator, made up of two classes: Beginning Illustrator and Illustrator 2. The first class teaches Adobe Illustrator from the very beginning, laying the foundation that allows you to take on the more advanced tools and techniques that are taught in the second class.
Purchase them separately or save $20 when you buy the bundle!
Writing. Clicking. Scrapbooking. Inspiration
Inspiration is everywhere. While most can spark our creativity, the golden ones translate directly and deliciously into layouts. While I was clicking around TinyPrints.com, I realized that I was surrounded by perfect layouts waiting to happen. Good graphic quality, great fonts, good colors. Everything was there.
Knowing that I have trouble with multi-photo layouts, I clicked the parameters to include cards with more than three photos. I found several cards that spoke to me and set about starting, and more importantly, finishing a handful of layouts. (more…)
Friday’s Freebie: Daily Drop Cap
aily Drop Cap is a project by designer & illustrator Jessica Hische. Starting in September of 2009, an illustrative initial cap was posted daily (or at least regularly), to prettify the internet and beautify your blog posts. Individuals are welcome to use the drop caps within blog posts by following the instructions below each letter. The project ended after the twelfth alphabet was complete, but the site remains up for your use and inspiration.
I can totally see one of these caps on a scrapbook page. Can’t you?
Design Resource: Before & After Magazine
One of my favorite resources for design tips is Before & After magazine. I’ve been a subscriber since it started in 1990 as a print publication, and still go back to some of those older issues. The information is still relevant because the principles are timeless. Now, Before & After is digitized with PDF issues, a blog called Design Talk and a YouTube channel.
In a video short, Creative Director John McWade demonstrates the art of extreme photo cropping. It seemed an appropriate technique for scrapbook page layouts, so I’m sharing the video here…and three stages of a layout that uses the technique.
The Layout
Stage 1: Full-sized photo
Stage 2: Extreme photo cropping
Stage 3: Finished Layout
What do you think about extreme photo cropping? Do you use it in your layouts?
John McWade is the founder and creative director of Before & After magazine. Be sure to check out the B&A site and YouTube channel. You won’t be disappointed.
Keeping it Real: Shaped Journaling
Welcome back to another keeping it real digital technique. Today I’ll share my steps for shaped journaling in Photoshop CS, one of my favorite journaling techniques for digi and hybrid pages. Let’s have at it! (more…)
Win a seat in Scraphic Design: Core
Scraphic Design: Core with Tiffany Tillman is back! And Cathy Zielske’s giving away a seat on her blog today.
About Scraphic Design: Core
The two-part Scraphic Design series began with the Foundations class, a 4 week journey into the design process that covers creative inspiration, sketching techniques, principles of design and how to build dynamic page structures.
Now, rejoin Tiffany Tillman for the second part of the series, Scraphic Design: Core. For an additional four weeks, add the complexities of layering, color usage, pattern alchemy, element addition, text work and realistic shadowing to the journey. Class concludes with a final critique on your finished class assignments.
If you haven’t taken Scraphic Design: Foundations yet, there’s a class going on right now!