My first freebie!

For those who are into design stuff (such as scrapbooking), then I have some freebie for you today:

(Click on image of preview above to download)

It's the flowers I used in my Sweet Twing layout I posted here yesterday. These are scanned from my doodles. I have quite a lot of them in my sketchbook now, only it took me some time to learn how to make the digital version look as good as it does on paper.

You see, when scanning drawings/doodles/paintings/etc, you have to deal with jaggies and stray pixels when you extract them from the white background of the paper.

Now that I think I've gotten the hang of it and learned how to properly turn my scans into flawless vectors (I hope!), I felt confident enough to offer them here as my first blog freebie.

The flowers are in .png format and you can CTL+J (copy+paste) them in CS3 several times and then flip some of them either horizontally or vertically or alternately change their sizes and then bunch them together on your layout. Or you can cut them apart and stamp them all over your page.

However you use them in your projects, I would love to see how you've used my first blog freebie. Send me a link or an email and point me to the site where I can see them (if you've posted them online). Don't forget me in your credits, too! And point other freebie hunters to my blog here, not to the download link ok? I just want people to pass by my blog first... :-)

Also, read my TOU (Terms of Use) included in the zip file. You can use these for any projects that are for your own personal use only. Don't worry, I will be offering freebies here for commercial use soon enough. But personal use items are for your own 'consumption' only, ok?

If you download, then please take the time to leave me a comment, either here or over at 4shared. Comment is free! And it only takes a sec or two. Intiendez?

Go download it now! :-) Enjooooooooy.....

More scraps...

Was able to scrap two more pages tonight (for my gallery over at digishoptalk.com. I'm still feeling my way through this new hobby which is quickly becoming addicting haha.

Scrapbooking is usually a hobby for married women slash mothers. Women who got tons of photos of their kid(s) and husband(s) that they can scrap.

So what's a single girl like me doing dabbling in digi-scrap? Don't ask me! But for a design-oriented, doodle-crazy girl like me, my civil status ain't enough reason to hold me back from scrapping pages like these:



So yeah, I guess I'm gonna scrap my photos (haha). And of course, there's the folks, and the friends, and my big, big family (I got quite a lot of cousins, and nephews and nieces). And don't forget the dogs and cats, too!

Credits for these layouts are on the images. Click on the photos to see larger views. The flowers on the two pages and the frame on the yellow page my doodles, which I scanned and vectorized in CS3. Later on, I'll try to post her a brief description of my process, for anyone who's interested.


In the meantime, tata!

My first scrap!

My first ever digital scrapbook page:


I'm pretty new to digital scrapbooking, but all the stuff I have seen posted in digiscrap sites all over the net are pretty amazing that I just had to give it a try. So this one here is my first shot at it. The flowers and the butterfly are hand drawn (scanned from my sketchbook and tweaked in CS3). The background paper was textured by overlays from different photos, a trick I learned from various digiscrap tutorials posted online.

I'm still learning, so this layout screams "NEWBIEEE!!!" I'm still getting a handle on how to achieve realistic shadows, the sort that makes the elements and photos look like they were pasted on the paper, and not floating above it.

There were a lot of freebies I downloaded from blogs and websites of generous digital scrappers (there's a LOT of them out there, my favorites: digifree.blogspot.com and ikeagoddess.blogspot.com) but I ended up making my own for my first layout. (I feel kinda guilty using stuff created by other people when I know I can make them myself).

I do plan to give away freebies here as well, from time to time, as a way of giving back to the generosity of the digital scrapbooking community (those scrap-for-charity gestures are really touching), and also because God said we should share what He has abundantly blessed us with.

So as a start, if you would like to get that butterfly and flowers I used in my first scrapbook page, then drop me an email over at my gmail account with this addie: 7sparrows (I deliberately wrote it this way to block off the nasty spam'rs and bot's.) Or you can just leave your email addie at the comments area in this post.

It's been crazy, but I'm back... I hope!

I'd like to say sorry to my friends and family who have been checking here now and then... I have been silent for a long time, due to being tied up with work, part-time design jobs, and family issues. It's true what they say that when it rains, it definitely pours!

I have been trying to keep my head above the water with the work stuff (been losing sleep!). Though I can't share everything here right now, I promise I will be spilling it out in my next posts in the following days. One problem with me is, I have a one-track mind- when I have a project, or when I'm occupied with something, I doggedly pursue that till the end and can't be bothered by anything else. I'm not so good with multi-tasking! When I'm busy with one thing, everything else tends to fade into oblivion, even those that needs my most immediate attention. This is a flaw, I know. A bad habit that's so hard to break.

Needless to say, there will be changes in this blog soon. I have recently gotten back to my artistic roots (which have for soooo long taken a backseat in favor of my writing) and I have found an avenue that can be quite beneficial to me, financially speaking (ahem!). Y'all know about it soon enough.

For now, I'm going to have to keep this one short. Just wanted to let you know guys that I'm still blogging here. Although for a while there, I feared that I might have to set up another blog account as I forgot my username to this blog! That's definitely a neon sign that says I've been gone from the blogging world long enough :-)