Monday, October 20, 2008

The Last of last week's 13

King Kat

Finishing up last week's T-13: Dante, from Purrageous Pirates, was standing up to look out a window, so I took the picture and moved him onto a transparent layer. I then found a pic of the empire state building online, and did the same.

I've gotten better at the cropping thing, but PS 5.5 is the first version that offers the background eraser, which is nice innovation PSPX1 has. Cropping in PS5 is still a pain in the behind nuisance. But I seem to do a lot of it.

I used the "What a Scream" kit from Kathy Goldstein for the scraps, and the Copper Alpha was a freebie from Janel Scraps.

tabby cat,Howl-N-Scream


The rest was just resizing and pasting. It did work out in the end and was rather pleased with it. (There was no way in hell I was going to be able to photoshop him holding Rachel Ray with a paw into it. Or course, now I'm think I might been able to dangle her from his mouth - like he was carrying her by the scruff of her neck? Oh well...)

I occassionally think I'd like to get onto someone's creative team, or maybe even do some tute writing, but let's be honest...I have no idea what I'm doing half the time so there's no way I could explain it to someone else.

Woofie of the Baskervilles

Roxy the Devil Dog seemed like a natural for this piece, but I was kind of hoping to find a new woofie or two. I've done that now, thanks to Ann. There are many, many dogs with blogs, but they don't seem as organized, nor quite the party animals, that the cats are.

In this case I edited Roxy using the lens flare effect in PS5.0 (because I know how to do it there) before moving over to Photosuite to assemble the piece. My problem with trying to put things together in PS5.0 is that you can't browse for the images. They don't show up unless they've been edited and saved in the program.

Dog,Howl-N-Scream


The Haunted House is from Chaos Priestess' "Night of the Dead" kit, still one of the better Halloween themed kits I've found. The rest of the scraps were from Jessica Edwards' "Trick-or-Treat" kit. The "Haunted House" Alpha was a freebie from Shel Belle Scraps (who did her TOU as a largely unreadable graphic).

I like TOU's, they allow me to find the blogs of the designers who did the kits and also allow me to credit them for their work down the road, especially on the freebie downloads. I don't care if you use Notepad, Word, Acrobat, or even turn it into a graphic, but (1) please be sure to put down who YOU are so I know who I'm crediting - especially if want credit - and (2) make it readable.

And I also like it if you pack a blinkie with it, because if I like your work, I'll put it up. (Eventually. I still have some I have to add.)

The Headless Horsecat

In the end, this turned out to be my favorite. Originally I was looking for a pic of a cat with it's head stuck in a bag (or something similar - I have an aversion to beheading them, even in Photoshop. However, I stopped by Mommy's Little Fat Boy and there was this picture of Sunny, sitting there so nicely. I have a black stallion on my calendar on the wall that I'd been looking at all month, and the whole thing just suddenly clicked.

After trying however, I could NOT get Sunny photoshopped onto that horse in a way that was remotely believable, so went to plan B, the stick horse. Which I think, worked out rather well.

Ginger Cat,Howl-N-Scream


The Scraps are the Scrap Happiness October Collaboration Freebie, except for the Pumpkin, which is from Giggly Girl Scrapz blog train offering, combined with AllieKat Creations "Build a Jack" kit (from AhhhScrap). The alpha is from Free Digital Scrapbooking, home of many free and useful Alphas.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for using my Halloween kit! I don't know how I happened upon it here. TFS