What I Made at the Expo

Welcome new followers! I'm always surprised and happy to see the numbers go up. But don't worry, I won't forget my my OG followers. 

I wanted to share with you what I made during the Scrapbook Expo last week.

Prima Make and Take:

     On the convention floor, different companies have a few seats for you to make a quick item using their products, next to their sales booth. You really have to work fast in hectic conditions as someone is standing behind you awaiting your seat. It reminds me of an experience I had with Dad and Jenn of eating dim sum in Hong Kong. Anyways, Jenn and I still managed to make a beautiful page using a ton of Prima flowers. I learned they started out in the floral industry before branching out to scrapbooking, I can tell by their innovative products, as you'll see soon. This page was only $3.00 and included all the papers, flowers, bling and lace. I encourage you to try make and takes at conventions if you have the time and patience.

Vendor make and takes

My Prima make and take page

SEI Class:

     I took an one hour class using a mini-kit from SEI. They have a monthly kit club and you can find the info here. Jenn and I did join for a while but couldn't keep up because they send you so much stuff each month, so we had to cancel. What I like best about SEI is that they are always innovative in how they use their papers and products. Whenever we take their class, they always have a new way to make a mini-album or an interactive element on a layout. I learned a new way to make an accordion album out of regular  papers. Here are the two birthday cards we made in the class. Who knows, you could be getting one of these next. 

SEI birthday cards

Prima Canvas Mini Album:

     The most elaborate class I took was the Down and Dirty Canvas Album by Prima. I had never taken any of their classes before. Each person had 20 masks and 8 bottles of glimmer mists to use within a small space. It was really messy and I was afraid of getting misted by my neighbors and vice versa. My hands were totally green by the end and I thought it looked like Elphaba. But the final product was super cute so it might be worth it if you don't mind the process. The class is entitled down and dirty. The pros of this technique is that the colors are very vibrant and it makes covering a page super quick, much faster than painting or papering a chipboard background. 

Elphaba hands

Prima canvas mini album cover

Here are some of the inside pages. The designs are the non-misted sections of the page, showing the original canvas color.

Mini album inside pages

If you haven't used masks and mists, here is a quick tutorial. You cover your paper with a shape or mask. Prima sells templates made out of plastic. I have a plastic snowflake on the paper. Then I spray with a colored, glittered spray. Mine is by Tattered Angles. The spray gets all over so I spray inside a cardboard box. When you are done, remove the mask and the negative space makes a white pattern on your paper. 

Remove the mask

Spray over the mask

Final product

You can really change up a plain piece of white paper or a plain canvas album.

original Prima album

Talk to you soon! I have to go to a teachers vs. JV boys volleyball game now.

Anaheim Scrapbook Expo

Cruising the Vendor Booths:
     Jenn and I attended the Anaheim Scrapbook Expo this past weekend. Prior to going to our first expo, Jenn asked what it would be like. I surmised, "I think it will be a horde of women carrying giant totes all grabbing at patterned papers." Here is a shot Jenn took of me on the vendor floor:

Scrapbook Expo Vendor Booths

Was my prediction accurate?

Our Copic Marker Class:
The hot commodity this time around were copic markers, the kind manga artists use to color their designs. People were buying them like hotcakes, and at $5 per marker, that really adds up.

This is a card colored with copic markers by Nichol Magouirk

     Jenn and I attended a copic marker class, where we learned several coloring techniques. Since it was a technique class, I don't have a finished product to show you. I thought these would be another fad, something a scrapper just had to have du jour. I was wondering why aren't regular markers good enough anymore? After attending the class, I totally understand the fervor. It is mainly used for blending. See the shading in the clouds and grass in the card above? It is achieved by blending several different shades of the same color together. If you color over a dark color with a lighter marker, the colors blend naturally and the lighter marker does not get ruined. I know I always disliked my yellow marker tip getting dirty. Even if you color directly on a yellow copic marker with a black marker, you can just color on paper, the black ink gets transferred to the paper and the yellow tip looks as good as new. There really are advantages to this product that can't be achieved with a regular set of markers. For Christmas Kevin bought me a set and now I feel confident in trying them out. I was too scared to use them prior to this. Yup, I asked for markers for Christmas in lieu of jewelry, what a scrappy nerd.

Seen Around Town:

      I've never been to the Anaheim Convention Center before, it is really quite impressive. We took some silly photos outside. 

At the front of the convention center with a view of California Disney

A golf convention was happening
at the same time,
you could easily spot the difference
between all the attendees

       Unfortunately, the scrappers were relegated to the dark, warehouse-like basement. The golfers and cheerleaders got the prime first floor location. My dad said the convention center had their priorities correct. I'm assuming he is a golf fan and not a cheerleading fan. 

All day and night mega crop

At a Prima make and take, I told Jenn not to put flowers
on her face, so she puts them on her ears, sigh

A must if you are in the area -
Joe's Italian Ice,
like Philly water ice
with custard and real fruit

We did a lot in the short time we had and tried to see and learn as much as we could. Jenn even won a prize. I'll share some of the projects I made in another post.

Jenn won a door prize, first time ever for either of us,
she is putting her Meisner acting skills to the test

 We laughed, we cried, we ate Italian ice in the rain. Sometimes it is more about the experience together rather than the actual expo itself that is memorable. 

Downgrading Background Annoyances

My First Class in Photo Editing:

     I took a class today called Beyond the Basics of Photo Editing with Photoshop Elements as taught by Patty Debowski. My version of Photoshop was too old and didn't have some of the features needed to complete the classroom demonstrations so I had to use the teacher's spare computer, so embarrassing. Later I practiced one of the things I could still do in my version - Creating a Focal Point in a Photo. This technique is used to eliminate distractions in the background, like blurring out bystanders in your photos.

     Here is my photo with a distraction in the background.

     Here is the photoshopped version with a Guaasian blurred background and focused foreground. Much better right? It makes the photo look 3-D. Thanks Jenn for modeling for this example, or was it just a candid photo?

     The other useful feature I learned was Groupshot Photomerge. I can't demonstrate this effect since I don't have it on my computer. But you can take several photos of the same group of people, erase the face you want, and transport it onto another body. If someone is closing their eyes in a photo,  you can place their face from another photo onto their body. Then everyone in the group can look good. It was really quick to do this. I know Jacob photoshopped a Christmas group photo and it took him several hours. 

      My head was hurting after two hours of learning commands on someone else's PC. I've never worked with Photoshop so I learned about layers, brush sizes, shortcut command keys and fancy tools from the sidebar. How do you find this fun, Kevin? Hopefully utilizing photo editing will help my layouts. Tomorrow I'm learning about copic markers, the tool of the manga artist. 

Ciao for now!