Schnegge's Strange Brew

Schnegge has done this absolutely awesome tag and tut using my new Strange Brew taggers kit.



You can find the tutorial in English HERE and in German HERE.

Be sure to stop by Schnegge's Tags and view all of her tutorials.

Follow your Fishies Tutorial

This tutorial was written by Dianna Richards of Digicats (and Dogs). Any resemblance to any other tutorial, published or unpublished, living, dead or undead, is purely coincidental.

Please do not rebroadcast, redistribute or otherwise claim this tutorial or any part there of as your own work.

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Items you will need to complete this project:

The Mermaid-topia taggers kit by Pimp'd Designz. This kit is available for purchase at Sophisti-Scraps.

Delerium #1 by Sophisticated Scraps and Imaging. This is a free to use tube which you can download HERE.

Cameron's Oceans 5 Mask, which you can download HERE.

Font of choice.

The Frazzled Mess alpha by Lady Grundlefunk. This is a full sized alpha that I resized for tagging. It is also free and available from Disasterpiece Studios.

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Note that H# and V# refer to Horizontal and vertical coordinates on your canvas grid. Make sure you have View, Rulers checked in order to see the ruler grid.

When I say "Add to your canvas" I expect that you will copy and paste it as a new layer, unless otherwise state in the tutorial.

This tutorial assumes you have a working knowledge of PSP. It was written using PSP X1, but should work in PSP 8 and up.

To begin, open a new raster layer canvas, 600 x 600 pxls, flood fill white.

Open Mermaid-topia pp2. Go to Layers --> Load/Save Mask --> Load Mask From Disk and find Cameron's Ocean 5 Mask. Make sure the Fit to Canvas box is checked as well as the "Invert Transparency" box. Then click on load.

Layers --> Merge --> Merge Group, then add to your main canvas, centered.

Open Bubble cluster, and add to your canvas, centered at H450, V300.

Open Sea Foam, resize to 50% and add to canvas centered at H250, V 350.

Open Rock, Resize to 60% and add to canvas, centered at H200, V400.

Open SSLisa Delirium 1. Erase Lisa's sig, then resize to 65% and add to canvas, centered at H250, V280.

Open Fish 1, resize to 75% and add to canvas, centered at H430, V110.

Duplicate and mirror the layer, then relocated the duplicated fish to H150, V500.

Open a new canvas, 600 x 600 pxls, with a transparent background. Using the frazzled mess alpha, spell out the words "Follow" "your" and "fishies". Use a combination of upper and lower case at random and resize and rotate to the letters to give the words a chaotic look. Delirium is, by nature, a very chaotic personality, so try to make the words reflect that.

Once you have composed the words you'll need, select layers --> merge --> merge visible, then use you selection tool to grab each word as a whole to paste to main canvas. "Follow" should be up around H180, V60. Use your pick tool to resize to taste. "Your" should be centered around H450, V250. I put a counter clockwise tilt to it to match the fish. "Fishies" is centered at H350, V450, with a clockwise tilt to it.

Open flower-1, resize to 25% and add to your canvas, centered at H100, V420.

Add a drop shadow to your tube and to the two fishies. In this case, mixing the shadows and changing the colors is fine. The tag is supposed to have a chaotic feel to it.

For the tube later I used Offsets H & V of 10, Opacity 60, blur 25, color black. For the top fishie, I switched the offsets to -7 each and the color to dark purple (#800080). For the bottom fishie I kept the V offset at -7, but changed the horizontal offset to -10, and the background color to dark blue (#000080).

Along the left hand side of the tag, using the font of your choice, add the copyright information to the tag. In this case:

(c) LK Designs http://sophisticatedscraps.blogspot.com
Scrap by Pimp'd Designs

I am using the Eraser Dust font, and dark purple (#800080), 6 points, bold, centered. You can also add your "tag by" info at this point if you wish.

You can then save your artist's copy as a .pspimage at this point.

To add the name, I used the "Freestyle Script" Font set to 36 points, Bold and centered. I used a black glitter stroke and set the fill color to light purple (#dc8cdc), which is the color on the background paper we used. It should be centered somewhere around H4to, and V375, depending upon the size of the name being used.

Once you've added your name, you can drop the white background, merge visible, and save as a .png - or you can leave the white background, merge visible, and save as a .jpg (your choice).

That's it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you should have a problem, please feel free to E-Mail Me and I'll be happy to help you out.

Toxic Poison

AhhhScrap is having their first $1.00 sale. It's Wacky Wednesday with selected Freebies at Taggers Scraps and Terminally Unique Designs is finishing of their 40% off sale today.

None of these has me in alt. Maybe I'm shopped out. I dunno.

What I really want is for Scrap Happiness for Digital Chaos to have a big sale, so can grab some Redhead's kits at a reduced price. She's got a bunch out that I want, but I'm somewhat adverse to shelling out $4 or $5 bucks per kit.

Diane at Candy's Treats has finished a new mega winter kit. Stop by her blog to get the freebie add on.

I fixed the Stagelight tag and I redid the Goth Girrrl tag to something I'm happier with.

Twisted Mind

I have a hard time figuring out what to do with head shots. I know some taggers really like them. Anyway, I saw a really interesting layout somewhere and I didn't recreate it, but it do sort of influence this layout.



The Poser is from the GI Babe collection from Perfect Posers. Soxsational Scraps Toxic taggers kit provided the tags.

That is not the little doll I wanted in there, but couldn't find the one I wanted. but overall, I'm rather pleased with it.

Kristy, over at Berry Bliss, has a bunch of those little dolls you can purchase for $1.50 each. I rather like the little Morticia doll.

I can always add my name and use it as a tag - I think I might do that. I'm getting a little tired of the Halloween one.

Eternally Alone

Very similar layout using different elements. The poser is from LK Designs from her freebie Attitude kit that you can find on the Sophisticated Imaging blog.



I used the Poison kit from Soxsational Scraps on this one. This is kind of a duality kit because on one hand it's all the Emo stuff, and on the other hand, it's Girl's rock.

Poisoned Rocker

So, this is the flip side of the Poisoned kit. The Rocker chicks are from the Hard Rock pack which is also a freebie from LK Designs and available on the Sophisticated Imaging blog.



I had to crop the head shot myself as none came with the kit, but this is a fairly common practice with Graphic Hobbiests. Why does it bother me to behead a cat, but not a human?

No fairies today. I did a couple but dont' like them, so I'm still looking for reworks on them.

Indulgence

These two I did do for myself and they're a little bit more graphic than the Fae tags.

The first one uses Jessica's Razors and Roses kit, which I got a Taggers Scraps.



It's a suicide/love triangle thing. The two head shots were from LK Designs' Good Vs Evil and and fully body chick is from the Hard Rock collection, both of which you can get at Sophisticated Imaging.

The second layout uses Thru Sugar's Eyes, also from Scraps by Jessica. This is a kit I think I'm going use quite a bit with the puddins as the colors will work really good, both with Miss Diamond and with Sir Tristan.



The Posers are from LK Designs' Attitude freebie.