Tag: photos

Graphic Design

Believe you can and you will

Jessica Smith

I love my Mac. OK, it’s not my Mac. It’s a work computer. But as I sit here on my laptop watching Iron Man 2 and messing around in Photoshop and InDesign, gah… it’s just awesome. I heart me some Adobe programs, too.

Before I go into this little graphic design project, I gotta give a shout out to my Ravens, who kicked some ass this weekend are going to the AFC Championship game next weekend. They will be playing the Patriots, just like last year. We lost at the last second, so it’s gonna be a huge redemption game for us. *Fingers crossed* This weekend’s game was probably the best, most stressful, well-played game I’ve ever seen. Holy moly.

OK, enough about football. Have you seen the printables that are meant to look like chalkboard writing? I tackled one tonight using a free chalkboard download here. They are available in three different colors from Blondie Loves. Download whichever you’d like and get to creating.

In InDesign, I messed around with the saying, “Believe you can and you will.” When I got an arrangement I liked (I used Appleberry and Clementine fonts, both are free), I copied it and dragged it into Photoshop.

Then, using the paint brush tool, I added just a few chalky accent lines.

Done-zo.

Believe you can

Check back tomorrow for a super adorable Valentine’s Day craft!

Home Improvement, Life

Weekend recap

Jessica Smith

This weekend has been pretty awesome. It started on Friday when my stepdad came over to remove the toilet and vanity from our family room bathroom. Then the hubby and I got to pick out a new toilet, vanity and light fixture — oh, and paint! We went with Behr’s Silent Ripple.

It is a light purple, but in certain lights looks a little blue. When we got home from buying our paint, I immediately got to work on the bathroom — even though it was 10 p.m. Three hours later, I was almost finished. I just had to cut in around the edges. Fun fact: I didn’t use any tape in the bathroom and it doesn’t look terrible! Yay!

Saturday morning started with loud thunderstorms and a swim meet. After the thunder calmed down, I rushed out of the house to see Elliott swim two races at his swim meet.

I got there just in time to catch his first race — it was a relay and he did the butterfly. Man is he fast! He also did a medley race, but was pretty tired from the earlier race because not much time was in between.

My dad, who has always been very involved in our sports, is an official for Elliott’s meets sometimes. Check him out — so serious!

When I was younger, he coached my soccer teams and he refereed soccer games. Now it’s swimming. He’s awesome.

Once we watched his first two races, the hubby and I headed off to Lowe’s. We had found a toilet at Home Depot the night before, but wanted to see what Lowe’s had as far as vanities went before making our purchase. We left empty-handed, planning ordering a light fixture and vanity online when we got home. But when we perused the interwebs, we decided that the cabinet to go with was the cabinet we almost bought at Lowe’s to begin with. So we got back in the car and headed to Lowe’s again.

Amidst all of the Lowe’s trips, I got to go out to lunch with my momma and BOTH of my sisters — that never happens! Allie is in town from Colorado just for the weekend 🙂 What a nice treat.

We ended out Saturday having dinner with Brian’s momma, then attending a block party in my dad’s neighborhood. I used to go to block parties each summer in our neighborhood, but they died down for a while. The neighborhood is trying to bring them back, which is a fantastic idea because they are so much fun!

Today, the hubby and I are cleaning up the house, grocery shopping and just taking it easy. Allie is going to come see our house for the first time! And John is going to come back over tonight the help us install our new bathroom purchases! Hooray.

On top of this fabulous weekend, Hobby Lobby gave me a sweet shout out on their Facebook page that pretty much made my entire life!

 

I hope you all had a great weekend — Bathroom reveal sometime this week 🙂

Tips

Crop-tastic

Jessica Smith

I am by no means a fantastic photographer, so the photography advice I give on my blog is few and far between (and is usually advice I got from someone with actual photography experience). I’ve been playing around with the macro feature on my camera lately, which results in really up-close-and-personal shots of the subject — in my case, things in my garden!

The details in the photos are impressive, but the compositions aren’t always great. So I started playing around with cropping and I’m loving the results I’ve gotten.

You can crop a photo in pretty much any program… Paint, Word, Photoshop, etc. You can even crop photos on WordPress and Facebook!

When you crop a photo, you are  selecting an area of a photo you would like to keep and then removing all of the rest (Yes, I know that most people know what this is… but just in case!). I’ve found that for detail shots, cropping is my friend big time.

My photos go from this:

To this:

If you have a very detailed photo, cropping the photo in just the right manner can enhance the detail even more. I think it adds a lot of texture to my nature shots that would have otherwise been lost.

Wouldn’t these shots look great as a gallery of square, matted frames?

These tight shots could be taken on a really nice camera, but my point and shoot camera isn’t all that sophisticated. For now, cropping and the macro feature will do just fine!