+ Drop C A P

working on another alphabet project

alphabet

Mr Peck got this book on his Kindle that is all about helping with creativity... We did this task of finding an alphabet is the things around us. It was actually really fun! Here's mine.

home sweet home.

Yes, that's right... I'm finally home! Yay! Oh the joy. It feels kind of weird. Like I'm on holidays now... although that's starting to wear off now with the realisation that I have to cook tea each night, and the house needs cleaning, and all the suitcases need unpacking, and there's lots of washing to be done, and I have to find a job, and ... the list goes on ..

The jet lag hasn't been too bad and I only woke up at 4am the first morning. I've been keeping pretty busy with trips to the doctor for Mr Peck's knee (he injured it while snowboarding) and trying to add more to my portfolio. It's slowly getting there... 

Here's a little something I designed for Valentine's Day.... 

I've got a few projects planned for Valentine's Day, but because Mr Peck reads this blog, and I want to surprise him, you guys will have to wait! hehe. I'm pretty excited about it though.. 

Well, back to work I go.. just wanted to stop in and say hi :)

Top 5 Design & Fashion Trends of 2011

I've been working on my portfolio. It's a slow but steady process. I'm looking for work. While that's been happening, of course I've been searching for inspiration.. looking at the trends, I thought I'd put together a little list for you.

In no particular order, the Top 5 Design & Fashion Trends that I'm noticing right now are:

Attitude of Gratitude + Design Day

Today I'm Grateful For

1. Thick socks on a cold day...
2. KnitPro that helps me to make pictures into knitting charts! What fun.
3. The new followers I have gotten! Yay, finally! Thankyou for following me ♥
4. Creative people who are aware of good design and make really cool things!

Today I have been working on a travel book design for my class to use when we travel to Chicago and NY in June/July.  I'm pretty excited and the more I work on the book the more I get excited. It doesn't quite feel real at the moment! And there is potentially big news that is kinda related ... but I haven't got confirmation on that yet... so we'll wait and see... 

So I thought I would share with you a few sneak peaks of how the design is looking ... and if any of you live in NY or Chicago and have some insiders tips, feel free to share! Would be so awesome and would help me to get even more excited! 

Blog Design

So... What do you think?

It makes me happy, especially all the yellow :)

I watched Megamind last night with Mr Peck and had a few good laughs... I thought it was pretty funny..(or maybe it was because we finished watching at 2am). I really enjoyed Megamind's mispronunciations.. Like the way he says 'Metrocity' not 'Metro City', 'Speeider', and my personal favourite - 'Ollo!'  hehe so good.

I also watched "The Tree", yet another great Australian film! I'm proud of Australian cinema at the moment! My favourite thing from this movie (apart from the fact that it had Marton Csokas - a favourite from South Solitary) was the music played during the credits and menu. Here it is for you to enjoy.

pinterest...

Well, there's been a lot of talk about Pinterest going around lately and I had heard of it, but never had a look... So last night I went to have a look. Bad Move!!

Not only is there sooooo much to look at, it's cool stuff to look at! Another site to get addicted to!

So here are some of my favourites! (I couldn't stop)

paper in the making.

Happy Sunday.

I am making paper today for my cards.

I have an order to fill from Little Indigo!

Pretty exciting :)

Here's a look at how I do it...

1} tear up paper  2} apply blender to soaked paper  3} fill sink with pulp and water, use deckle to form sheet  

4} turn sheet onto board, sponge water from pulp & leave to dry

New on Papelink

Oi.
Here's the result of a semi-hard days work.

You can find the rest of the range over at my facebook page and on my Storenvy for purchase.

I am having a giveaway through my facebook page once I get to 50 likers.. I'm a little over half way so don't forget to go and like the page to be in the running!!

sunday funday.

Today is:

1} Washing - and lots of it due to the awesome weather we had last week [NB: heavy dose of sarcasm]

2} Just coz it's cute :) I made the owly, the pears are from a friends wedding and the sticks are from a tree at college that had real nice mossy stuff on it :)

3} Card designing. Those are my very broad ideas... pretty much anything & everything.

EDIT: just as I'm posting this - it's starting to rain.. Dang Nabbit!!

Giveaway from Papelink.

Hello.
Decided to do a little giveaway on my Papelink facebook.

The aim: To get to 50 likers.

Then: Pick a random liker.

And: They get any card of their choice. Free of course. It's a giveaway!

Here's some inspiration:

  

  

So......
Off you go, get liking & spreading the word :)

handmade recycled paper.

Hello.

Last week [or maybe the week before last] I was at home and running my card ideas by my mum.

Always a great idea to do this because if your mum is anything like mine, you will come away with infinite new ideas & inspiration.

Which I totally did.

One of those ideas was instead of buying water colour paper to make my cards out of [which was ending up way way too expensive] why not make the paper.

Brilliant! Because what I really wanted out of my paper was for it to be a little bit rough and full of texture and looking like a sketch page... 

So after much time in-between that was filled with lots of other stuff to do [which I wasn't too happy about - I just wanted to try it!] I finally got around to making some! 

We used to make the stuff as kids and had a bit of a kit so I used that and some scrap paper I had laying around  [I'm thinking I might be able to source free scrap from college.. they just chuck it anyway - that means FREE paper :)]

Here's a look see at how it turned out [I should have taken process photos.. next time]

I only made 2 pieces to start as I wasn't sure how it would print/look/work but I am totally happy with it [apart from the creasing - not sure where that came from ;) and the dimensions of the sheet of paper are a bit different to my design so I just have to adjust that]. 

I want to also experiment with different fabrics in the middle of the paper making sandwich instead of the standard fly screen stuff... so instead of the squares I can get a linen effect or similar.

The other great thing about homemade paper is you can do any colour, any texture, any additions [such as perfume, cotton, leaves, glitter etc] that you wish and that goes with you're design.. Awesome..!

And of course, you just can't beat free!!

I'm trying to think up of a name for my cards too.. like 'such & such' by Flashbox Creative.

So any ideas are welcome!!

free brush download. again.

Well, I don't think that my free brush download lasted for very long... that link probably expired after a day or something I guess..

So now I've uploaded it to my Deviant Art site (that has not been updated in a very very long time, so don't judge ;) so you can follow this link to get it from there.. or simply click on the image below :)

Disclaimer:
These brushes are for personal use only. Please do not use them for commercial purposes or for profit. 

featured.

Hello All.
Been away for the weekend.. again!!
This time we went camping with my bestie Steph & her husband. The location was really cool - right next to a rushing river (that was so loud you couldn't hear anything else - awesome!). Only problem was it was wet... and by wet I mean it rained the whole time! But super fun anyway!

It's nice to be home & clean! 

But the point of this little post was to let you know that one of my Valentine's Day cards got featured on the Storenvy blog! Yipee! So that has bumped up views! 

If any of my readers want to purchase a card, I have 2 shops you can go to -

Storenvy (which has most of my cards - or will have - because it is free for unlimited listings [only problem being it is in $US but that's fine for you US readers!]) 

-&&-

Big Cartel (which only has 5 listings for free and that's all I want at the moment until I know it's working for me... [but it is in $AU])

I have a range of cards, not only Valentine's Day cards... so please go check them out..

Shoppe!

Hello.

I'm kinda excited to say that I put up some cards in an online store.. which is great.. except that I haven't had a chance to take pretty pictures of them (which I'm thinking I will do today if I get to it!).. and I can only put 5 up at a time (for now, unless I decide that it's worth paying for the shop)...
But better than nothing!

Please go and have a look!
And totally buy something if you likey!
And if you wanna see my other cards, email me! or comment me!

Photo Editing Tutorial Part 1

Hey Blog.

I just wanted to take this time to share a few of the things I have learnt about editing photos while being a photographer, specifically for weddings.  They are only short tips and if you want to know more, let me know.

You can see some of my work at Flashbox Creative.

Some of this stuff I'm sure you will know already but hopefully I can share something new with you. I've put together a list of top tools and processes I use to try and speed up the process of editing over 1000 photos per wedding. And if you know something I don't, please please let me know! Sharing is caring, and I don't think enough people (especially pros) do enough of that theses days! How are we supposed to learn things if people better than us aren't sharing and teaching?

So here goes:-

Taking a photo in RAW is similar to capturing an unprocessed negative on a film camera.  RAW does not compress or process the image at all (as JPEG does).  It captures a lot more information than a JPEG and thus gives you greater room for editing. Any decent DSLR camera will have the option to shoot in RAW.  

Once you have your RAW images you have to convert them into JPEG form to print or for general use.  But before you do this it's a good idea to do all your editing.  For this I use Photoshop's RAW editor called Camera Raw. Other programs have different plugins but Photoshop's version works great for me!

The easiest way to work through your RAW images is explained in my next point - use Adobe Bridge.

 Bridge comes with the Adobe Creative Suit and is excellent for processing your images.  You can do all sorts of things from Bridge such as give images labels or ratings so you know which ones need more work, or which ones you're happy with.

You can also do a Batch or use Image Processing which is very very handy when you have a lot of images to get through and want to apply similar editing for all the images.

So after you've selected your options you click run and Photoshop automatically goes through and applies these settings to the the images you want and you have time to get on with other work!

Actions are a great way to automate colour correction or processes you want to add to you images.  By saving your processes as actions you can achieve the same look with lots of photos without having to remember how you did it or run through hundreds of repetitive steps.  You can use these actions in conjunction with the Image Processor and Batch tools found in Bridge and edit 1000 photos with one click and a little bit of waiting time (in which you can get more important things done.. like knitting!)... very handy!

I'm not going to go through how to use them because there are hundreds of tutorials that already do that (and probably better than me). Try Googling it and I'm sure you'll find hundreds! This is mainly an overview of what you should be using to speed up the editing process.

Hopefully you've found these tips useful! Stay tuned for Part 2 in which we'll look at touching up images using Photoshop.

blog withdrawals

I'm having blog withdrawals!!
I have 1 day left here in Tasmaina and then I'm off to Melbourne and then HOME!! Yipee home sweet home!!

Did I mention that I was in Tasmania? We were here for a wedding last Sunday and have been staying with family since then. ..

Can't wait to be home! Will post some pictures and some fun things that are gunna happen in the new year for Flashbox Creative and my personal projects... Some exciting things ahead!!!!

Project Revealed!

Hello.

So here are a few snapshots from my very own greeting card range!
So far I have around 9 different designs for all sorts of occasions including birthdays, weddings, engagements, births and just coz.

Sorry about the watermark... it's just in case....
I'm a little bit scared someone will steal my ideas.. that's why I'm only showing you 2... I'll show you the rest when I get them selling and they are out and about.

I have had 3 responses from my series of emails all saying they are interested, but not until the New Year.. But I'm pretty happy with that.. It gives me time to work out prices and crank out a few more designs!

Enjoy!

nervous/excited

Hello.
I just send a whole bunch of emails about my little project that I mentioned ageees ago...
If I get some replies I'll let you know.

hello new layout...!

What do you think?
Hope you like it! :)

I'm so hungry! I really really wish that berries were cheap here!! This tiramisu looks so so good right now!! Mouth watering!

That's all!

Raspberry Tiramisu from Sophistimom - Well Fed