My Little Tent

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Miss Diamond, bravely camping out on the bedroom floor in her little tent. You have to be careful down there. You never know what sort of monsters (beside dust bunnies of incredible size) might be lurking around.

I should have put a drop shadow on the frame to make it look more 3D. I think I saved the working file, so I can still go back and do that.

I paid $18.00 for that little tent mail order and it was well spent, as she absolutely loves it!

I used Raspberry Road Designs' Scouts Honor kit to put this together.

Of Wolf and Man

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These three canines are or where all residents at Wolf Haven. Wolves are still some of my favorit animals, and they are extremely intelligent. Windsong is the pale wolf on left, Destiny is black female on the right. Timber is the big fellow in the middle.

I used Raspberry Road Designs' Scouts Honor for the background and Java Joe for the frame, the lettering is from Free Digital Scrapbooking and the feather is from Scrap Girls.

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

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In Western Culture, the Lion is considered the King of the Beasts. In the Eastern Culture, it's Tigers that are given that exhalted position. I never quite understood why Lions rated the King of Beasts title, and rather believe that Tigers rule the animal kingdom.

These three fellows live in the various zoos. The big one in the middle is from the Miami Zoo, the handsome fellow on the left in is the Buffalo Zoo and the sleeping kitty on the right is in the Cleveland Zoo.

I again used Scrap Girl's African Beat Collection on the composition. It's very attractive mega kit, well worth $10.00.

For more animals visit Friday Ark at Modulator.

Rutgers

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Rutgers was the former Mascot of the Fort Myers Miracle. He was "traded" at the end of the 2004 season to Hudson Valley Renegades of the New York Penn League and more or less retired from mascoting in favor of a person in a smelly, furry suit.

He was named for Rutger's University, his owner's alma mater, and he was the fourth in the line of Goldies the Miracle used as mascots starting in 1992 with the legendary Jericho, who was Rutger's great, great grandsire.

You can find more about Rutgers on Diamond's Blog which was the reason I did this piece in the first place.

This was done using Scrap Girl's Afican Beat Collection for no better reason than because I'd just purchased the kit and wanted to use it. I might have to redo it because I see a few errors, and I need to rescan the big pictures of Rut, so they are not so grainy. It's a little hard, working on the smaller screen at home to see what I'm doing.

I get Misty

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Misty is a 9 year old Rotty/German Shephard mix who lives with Peanut, her daughter, and Smokey, a Lynx-point Meezer, in Far Rockaway, New York. She was adopted from the North Shore Animal League and had one litter of 9 puppies with her Mom, Rose, before she was fixed. She is the Alpha Dog of her pack and is very protective of household, despite being a big mush (as she calls it) at heart.

I used Raspberry Roads Designs' Java Joe kit on this, which is a really nice freebie kit you can download from them.

Misty is one of the Pikapet Crowd, and got one of the posse badges, which was an idea that sort of fell by the wayside. We might pick it up again later, but I'm afraid that half of the Pikapet Crowd is a little too young for duel role playing (role playing your pets who will be role playing). And Rose would be running three characters which isn't really fair to her.

Scout Cat

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The Scout Cat Promise

On my honor, I will try:
To serve Bast and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Scout Cat Law.

The Scout Cat Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister or brother to every Scout Cat.

Miss Diamond is nominally a girl scout, or at least the unofficial mascot of my friend Jane's Girl Scout troop.

(You will notice the word Obedient is no where in the above Promise and Law.)

Raspberry Roads Designs had a very extensive scout kit in their Dollar Store, but it is themed more towards boy scouts. Still, I figured I could work with it. I'll have to do some pages for Jane's Scouts as well.

Walk on the Wild Side

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Have we mentioned that Thursday is Grr-Day at House Panthers?

I was looking throught some galleries yesteday and saw a similar layout. Since I finally go the Wild Kingdom collection downloaded from Raspberry Roads Designs, I went a head and did this one for Grr. I recall seeing a Wild Animal patterned Alphabet Set, and need to track that down and buy it. Alphabets are my biggest problem right now, as I can't find any that I like for the kits that I have.

A Matter of Faith

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Faith Boomerang was one of Momma Tortie's babies. Momma Tortie was a feral rescue that they ML took in while she was pregnant and kept until the kittens were born and old enough to give up for adoption.

Once Momma Tortie was surrendered, she went wild again and was considered unadoptable. So she was sent to a cat refuge to live out the rest of her life in piece and quiet. It's a big two story house out in the country on a big fenced piece of land. The cats have the run of the house, and SPECIAL cats, like Momma Tortie, also have outside time to run and hunt and climb.

Next they were notified that that Babie Tortie was biting. So they went and picked her up and brought her back home. Since ML had been counseled to have "have faith" during the whole ordeal, it was obvious that the returning kitten had to be named Faith. And well, Boomerang is also kind of obvious.

Anyway, you can find Faith online at Missy & KC. Be careful, she might purr you do death!

I used Free Digital Scrapbooking's Hope, Faith and Love Papers and Digital Freebies' Spring Fling Embellishments.

Note on October 7, 2008: Hippo Purthday to Faith Boomerang, who turn one year old today!

Spring Fling

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I had gotten all the Easter decorations up and did some mock up shots. It was way too dark to shoot by the time we got around it last night and even with the flash there wasn't enough light. However, it gave me an idea of what I'm looking at.

These were some of the best of the shots. I used the Spring Fling kit which I purchased from Digital Freebies. The Alphabet is Liquid Silver from Free Digital Scrapbooking. I'm not happy with it, but I can't really find a good Spring Alpha that like better.

On a side note, I went to purchase some of the kits I saw at Raspberry Roads but did not get the E-mail link to download them. After checking around their site, I finally gave up and e-mailed them.

I just checked and there is an e-mail there with the download link, so I'll be able to snag them. One the Wild Kingdom papers and Element Packs, and the other, from the Dollar Store is a rather large collection of boy scout related material. I really needed girl scouts, but I should be able to make due. Camping is camping, right?

In any case, it was just kind of disappointed that the store front did not work as well as I'd have liked and that the help page, while it explained what I needed to do, didn't point me in the right direction to get the downloads.

Fun with Filters

This is the original picture with no modifications.



This is the same picture with the watercolor filter applied



This is the Neon edges filter. I like the way this one turned out. I think it is my favorite of the experiments, as it makes her look dark and mysterious. I figured out how to change the color of the neon as well!



This is the poster edges filter. I suppose when Diamond becomes a Celebricat, there will be lots of posters made of her, and they will look like this?



This is the glowing edges filter. It has potential, but I don't think it was reached in this picture.

But then Zoolatry, who is 100 times the artist I am, counters with the following...

Silhouette. Basically, it's just Diamond matted out of the background.

She called this Shadows, but it's basically the silhoutte shot with the outer glow effect added.

This is like my favorite of the set. It looks much better on screen at work than on the screen at home though. It's the subject (Diamond clipped) with the outter glow applied to her. I don't know if the background is an add in, but I assume it is. The lens flair filter is then added for star effect (see Evil Annie).



This one is pretty nice too. Once again, it's the subject with the outer glow filter. I assume the frame is an add on as my Photoshop version did not come with built in frame effects.

The main problem is hate matting out the background, which sort of limits what I can do. I wonder if there's an easier way to mat in Photosuite...