Tag, you're it

I think I'm having a moment of revelation here. "Tagging" seems to be taking the work of an artist, usually a sensual female or something similar, and decorating it with scrap book pieces. I find a lot of redundancy in the scrap book kits and that probably because most of the kits are compiled from stock art that's been colored or modified in some way. Atomic Cafe and several other places also provide "scrips" or "actions" which help the scrap kit designs in creating something for their kit. This is probably why so many designs keep using the same tired old dragonflies and emo skulls and (yes butterflies and flowers). One of the reasons I like the kits that Kathy Haworth (Tizzy's Angel) puts together is that they're different. She uses a lot of her own photography in designing her pieces. She doesn't compile so much as she creates.

"Taggers" often purchase stock art in the form of PSP tubes to use as the center piece of their tags. Some of this stock art is photography.

I guess I see no difference then, in using photos of cats to create my tags, and if it came down to that, I could probably do my own artwork as well, as judging from some of the "tubes" I was looking at, I'm a better artist.

In any case, a few new tags:



Momo lives down under and she's actually a very beautiful and colorful cat. I faded her out for this pieces as I was trying to make her look a bit "ghostly". I used the Gothik Vampyre kit by Tizzy's Angel for this one, it's really one of the nicer Halloween kits that has come out.



Poor Pumpkin, she always gets made into a pie around this time of year. Here she's begging for Candy Corn instead. This was done using the Spookable kit from Honored Scraps. It's a just a quick little piece that isn't meant to be be really spooky. Notice however the candle...

Now, skip on over HERE and have a look at the one in this layout of Miss Diamond. The kit I used on this was Gothic Rougue by Yarrow. Same candle, different colors. Although I think the designers in Digital Chaos share around more than most. I still like their work however.



I mentioned the harvest moon element in the Night of the Dead kit. Well, here it is in a tag for Little Isis. This was actually a pretty easy job to do as Isis was in silhouette in the shot.

Finally, not really a tag, this was done to 8 x 10 size and is from Yarrow's A Pirate's Life kit, which I like quite a bit. (I liked it better before I noticed it shared a lot of elements with Bluedream Designs' work. Oh well.)



I love Diego by the way, I think he's a great cat and this worked well for Meow like a Pirate day as well as Fluffy Friday on House Panthers.

It was a dark and stormy night...

More Halloween fun...I love this stuff, I really do...



She was sitting around "menacing" T.C. Her presence in the room is enough to menace T.C., even when she's not paying attention to him. So I snapped a picture. She looks just spooktacular, don't you think?

I used the Spookable kit from Honored scraps on this one. Cute little kit, but not as much fun as I was hoping it would be.



Stygia is one of the new house panthers on the scene. He's been doing Stygian Saturdays. You can find him at T'Abby Normal and Stygian Panther.

I used Fright Night from Creations by Jo. She's got a few dark kits, but she'd borderline goth at best. Nothing really hard core. This is a cute little kit that has possibilities, and is a little bit more spookier than Spookable.



Not all Halloween cats need to be black. A pumpkin tabby works just as well. This is Moe from Team Tabby who seems to be a VERY unthreatening cat.

I used Chaos Priestess Night of the Dead kit, which I just realized, as I was working on this piece, has a harvest moon element in it. Now I'll have to do something with that. And I think I know just the thing...

It actually IS a dark and stormy night out tonight and is raining down cats and dogs to go with the lightning and thunder, so I'm guessing I should get off the computer now. All these kits can be found at Digital Chaos. There's a blinkie on the right side of the page for the store. Use it, and have fun!

Howl N' Scream

I love fall - I love all the fall colors - even though in Florida, everything is still green - and I LOVE Halloween. I really appeals to the Goth in me.

So needless to say, despite stressing with the tabbies, in still in my creative glory.



This is the way "Steve" our newly acquired loverboy Tabby views Miss Diamond. Sometimes, this is the way I view Miss Diamond as well. She does have cruel streak in her.

This kit was done with the Gothik Vampyre taggers kit by Tizzy's Angel and is done to a 6 x 6 inch format (all the pieces in this post were) which is standard for taggers. I have no idea how I can print these things because I don't think you can order 6 x 6 inch prints.

Maybe I'll redo it to 5 x 7. In any case. Coming up for Grr's day on Thursday, I present to you the heart of darkness herself:



Grr, in Night of the Living Grr, including her formerly blond, now Goth, girl. This was done using Chaos Priestess Night of the Dead taggers kit which is a delightful little kit that will appeal to all the dark things in your heart.

I am thoroughly enjoying this one!

If you looking for a freebie, Kristin's Wicked Scraps has a nice little freebie called Spooky Halloween which I think was just the right speed for getting Spooky Do all dolled up for Fright Night:



Spooky Do is a nice cat who would never pick on poor loverboy tabbies! LOL!

Stayed tuned....more Howl N' Scream fun is on the way!

Dark of the Moon

I really have no idea what Miss Diamond does when she goes out all night. The other night she was out catting around until 2:00 A.M. Maybe she does have a magical garden she goes off to rule. Tonight she had a unicorn come to visit.



This piece was done with Helly's Midnight in the Garden Scrap Kit. The Unicorn is a freebie from Grafix4All.

Two ploppers

Scout Cat is contemplating camping out on the scanner this weekend. I have different plans for it. This plopper is from Rasberry Roads Design, using their Scouts Honor Set. There are five separate sections to that set, each a $1.00 each. I sort of doctored it up a bit with some additional elements from other parts of the set:



After all she is a cat - not a cub - scout.

From Helly comes this lovely desktop freebie:



It is part of her Faery Magick collection and I'm not really sure what to do with it, as it says it's active deskop element...but...it doesn't really do anything?

Oh well.

Party like it's 2004

I'm supposed to be getting another cat. At least, Jeff Davis, when he finally came in to drop his paperwork off asked me if I wanted one. After much discussion, I decided it would be good idea to get a second one as it would give Diamond someone else to be attached to. She is rather overly fond of me.

However, when Jeff came by Monday he came without a cat, who evidently had gone outside on Sunday and not returned. The cat had belonged to his neighbor, who'd had their house foreclosed and who'd left, sans cat, figuring the Davis' would take care of him. They already have several and one more was not working well in the household.

The cat's name is Steve, or so I'm told, although that will likely change once I get to know him. Jeff tells me he's a brown tabby with white paws, which makes me lean toward calling him Kitty Deeds, a named I'd used on a similar looking feral I'd been trying to tame back in 2004. And that got me thinking about former Miracle player Dougie Deeds, which is where I got then name from.

Dougie spent the 2008 season with AA Tennessee after being traded to the Cubs during winter meetings and finished up the year batting .349. Kind of a step down from AAA Rochester but hey. We liked Dougie when was here, and we still miss him.

So one thing lead to another and I dug out the photo albums from 2004. All those pictures need to be scanned. I don't have them on CD. And with the exception of guys like Frankie Liriano, Scotty Baker and Nick Blackburn who've all gone to the majors, there's little reason to scrap book any of that year as they're certainly not going to be around to get autographs from. But...one thing sort of lead to another and I figured, well, I could do them for the website...

I discovered my scanner, which automatically scans stuff a 200 DPI, will actually scan up to 9600 DPI. I tried scanning to 1200 DPI, but it takes for freaking-ever to scan one little picture. So I've now settled on 600 DPI, which, if I'm working on 5 x 7 pieces should be fine, and not pixelate if I should happen to want to print them later for whatever reason.

Chaos Priestess has a new free Mini-Taggers kit called an Earthly-Air Romance which I rather like the colors in. (Miss Diamond will tell you "romance" is not a word that applies to me otherwise.) C.P. Designs does a lot on the black, white and gray theme, and I generally find her stuff useful.





The stars in the first piece are from Digital Chaos and available as a freebie element, as is the frame I used in the Matt Yeatman piece, which was done by Yarrow. C.P. Designs has a couple of frames that I've download, but they are in .PSD format and I've not felt like doing the work to convert them over. The brushed Metal Alpha is one I way over-use from Nettie B. Scrapz.

This next one of Matty uses the Eternity scrap kit which I've used on on a couple of pieces I've done in the past as well:



I snagged the little tag from Bluedreams Designs Earth kit.

Eternity and Gray Delight are two little kits from Chaos Priestess that I found came in really handy for scapping the Sara-Reds.

In the same color theme is Yarrow's Minutes to Midnight kit which I used on this one of Travis. In looking at it, I think I need to grayscale that picture and should probably go back and work on that.



Another one of Matty, using Helly's Could be Happy kit:



I rather miss Matty as well. There's some thing really attractive in watching something that BIG throw a ball.

One guy who is still around - but for how much longer? - is good ol' Eli Tintor. 2004 was his rookie year and it was also the year that Joe Mauer found the death zone in the Metrodome and tore up his knee. So we ended up using a number of catchers over the season, Tint was up for like 10 or 12 games in July.



This uses Dale Ann Cubbage's Boy Crazy kit (which Miguel describes as "fruity") and was done to a 12 x 12 format - standard scrapbook size.

Jose Morales is also still around - more or less - although he spent a good chunk of the season on the DL with AAA Rochester again.



This was done using the Satin Grunge kit from Tizzy's Angel, and is in 5 x 7 format.

Not around anymore is Ron Perodin...I used Yarrow's Gothique Violet add on for this one and have made a note to myself to buy the full version of the kit.



I did a few more I'm not really happy with (you can find them here if you really want to, so maybe I will redo them. (Although the J.T. would probably be okay if I sepia toned the picture.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to spend the weekend scanning if I can convince Miss Diamond not to sit the scanner while I'm trying to use it.

Small World - or at least, small Cape

There are three boys that hang out at the ballpark - Brett, who is the oldest and getting ready to go to college helps me out the most, with getting autographs. Jeff is Gene's son and was a bat boy for the Miracle for a while and T.J. I didn't really place T.J. except (1) I knew he came from money, and (2) he's Canadian.

I should have figured it out when he told me that he had a twin sister, but I just gave him a hard time about there being two of him.

Anyway, Brett e-mailed me yesterday with some shots of TJ he'd taken at a Cape Coral High School Seahawks game and wanted to know if I could do a layout for him, so that he could get it signed. He thought T.J. would get a kick out of it.

And he said "His last name is Cresswell if you need it. I am not sure if TJ Cresswell or Taylor Cresswell would look better." That's when it hit me. He's Neil's boy.

I used to work for Neil. He wasn't so bad, his partner Art is a big dick however. A few years ago...Summer of 2005, Neil said he was taking his boy to a Miracle game and so I made a point of getting a ball to give to him, which I usually do when one of my friends is coming for the first time. I don't know if T.J. had been out to the park before and I only saw them briefly. Neil's usually pretty busy and doesn't stay in one place very long. The next day, Art fired me, which - from what Shawna told me - pissed Neil off royaly, but he won't over rule Art on business matters. Also, Neil always calls him Taylor, not T.J. so you know...the names didn't click either.

Next time I see T.J. I'll have to tell him to tell his Auntie Shawna hello from me and reminder her we're supposed to go out for lunch together sometime.

I guess I didn't make the connection because I thought Neil's kids were a bit younger, but yeah, I guess the age is about right now that I think about it.

Que it's a small world music....



This is an 8 x 10 layout. In both cases, the background came from a freebie Blues Pack I'd downloaded off of Digi-free. For this piece, the orange paper was from Candy's Treats Fire freebie. The logo I found off a google image seach on one of the school websites. The CC High School site wasn't working. Brett said he took the shots late at night, so they're kind of dark and not all that good.



This one was done to print to 5 x7 size and the orange paper came from Shhhh Scrapz Burnt Orange freebie.

The Brushed Metal Alpha in both pieces is from Nettie B. Scrapz.

Chris & Burke

Some guys, I really want more than just general satisfaction in the layout. I feel the need to do them justice. The Orioles layouts for expample, are satisfactory, but not really very creative.

One of the guys I'm overly attached to is Chris, now with the Florida Marlins, and while I like Amy Blesser's Rainy Day Sunday kit and felt this piece turned out rather well, in retrospect, I wanted something...uhm grungier.:



SO I went with Helly's Could be Happy kit and decided I was much happier.



I wonder if we're going to see the Marlins over here for Spring Training. That would be a really fun game. The Brushed Metal Alpha in the second piece is from Nettie B Scrapz.

Burke I REALLY have to be happy with. This first piece is a combo of kits from Helly:



The background is from A Woman's Love, the frame is from Movin' On, the elements are from Wannabe. It's okay. After messing around some though on a Danny Worth piece, I went back and settled on just the Wannabe kit with much better results:



I knew that kit had potential!

The Bracket Frames and the Cardboard Tags are freebie add ons of course.

Burke is with the Marlins now too, having switched affiliations in the Miguel Cabrera trade. Like I said, a game against the Fish would be FUN!

The masking tape alpha is from Jan Hosford, BTW and can be found at Digital Freebies.

Frame up

I decided I needed tags to go with the Could be Happy kit. Helly's got some layered tags available, but after trying to play with them, I've decided I'm hopelessly inept at Photoshop. Or at least, I need a "how to" manual. The one that came with the program I've sort of lost over the course of the years. As I'm running a old(er) version of PS (5) I think I'll try hitting up One for the Books and see if they carry anything out-of-print like that.

However, be that as it may...I was scrolling through Helly's blog and found freebie cardboard tags she'd done much earlier in the year, and a little further back, bracket frames. Much as I liked the layouts to date, they kind of look a bit like magazine covers. For example:


This was a try out piece using Helly's Get Real Sampler.

The frames solved that problem:







I also downloaded a whole bunch of freebies kits she had available, some of which look like like they have potential, including the "Wannabe" kit that I used to make a "Movie Star" layout for my little Starlet.



I THINK this is a taggers kit and I did the piece to 12x12, which is standard scrapbook size, so I probably wouldn't want to try printing it. Then again, it doesn't look pixelated on the screen.

A side effect of all this downloading was that I had to come up with a different subfolder system, so now the kits are stored in subfolders by designer name and then by kit name, which make it a lot easier to find things, especially as I tend to use several designers more than the others (Helly, Yarrow, Tizzy's Angel, etc.)

I also decided I needed a certified Helly stalker blinkie, which I added to the side bar. :)

The Chrome Alpha on the Wannabe piece was a freebie from Scrapdolly (I finally found the credit for it), while the Duct Tape alpha is from Maria LaFrance. That Chrome Alpha is the same one I used on the Tosoni piece (below) and the Berg piece as well.

Could be Happy

I'm more or less broke at the moment, it was a short pay this week and after rent and bills and groceries and gas, I'm pretty much done in. So rather that work on something I feel the need to get printed over the next few days, I decided to scrap some of last year's crew, in part because some of these kids went on to win an Appy League Championship and I want the new designs for the sidebar on the GCLTwins site.

In this particular case, I was playing with the "Could Be Happy" kit by Helly. The papers are nice and I love the cute plump little blue bird of happiness.



Ben tore up the Midwest League this year, earning himself MVP despite finishing off the season on the DL with particles in his knee. Couldn't be happier with him!



Stuif on the other hand was on the DL all year long. He could have been in the Olympics. But for the moment, he probably could be happier.



Danny Rondon was on the title winning E-Twins team although his year probably didn't go as well as he would have liked it to go. I was however, no where near as bad as Mr. Berlind's.



Papi played only 10 games this season and was DLed most of the year. Not a good way to start your career as I believe he was DLed for most of last year's GCL season as well.



He was a reliever that was converted to a starter then sent to E-Town and and went back in the bullpen. But he did pitch in relief in the championship game and did a great job. Couldn't be happier.



Brito started the year in E-Town then got promoted to Beloit when the injury bug hit the Snappers. Did a fair job up there.

Not a part of this set, is this piece I did for T-Bone using Helly's Apologize freebie, although the little star doodle is from Could be Happy. I just loved these papers.



As Rene hit the game winning home run yesterday, he couldn't be happier and he certainly has nothing to apologize for.

I've said it before, but the Duct Tape alpha is by Maria LaFrance and is available at Digital Freebies. The Chrome Alpha on the Tosoni piece was an uncredited it I got off Digi-free.

(Speaking of which, I missed new release Tuesday yesterday. Whaaaa! must go see what is going on!!!!