Cloudy Weather Photos

We were lucky to have glorious weather on our recent trip to Bournemouth. The books and games didn't even make it out of the box. There was just one day when it clouded over in the afternoon - fortunately for mother in law who was visiting that day and doesn't like the sun. I still wanted to include the photos and a picture of hubby walking barefoot on the sand is rare indeed and not to be missed.

I ran this photo through Picmonkey, first using the auto enhance then increasing the saturation slightly. I also made a Holga version. This is one of my favourite effects. If the picture is dark anyway why not make it atmospheric too!  All these effects are free.

I used Mandy King's A Shore Thing, including pre-made borders, and made two versions of this page. First, using the photo for the background:

 

Then I used a sandy paper background and added the photo and another border at the bottom of it.

August Daily Word Challenge

August is a bit different ... instead of giving you words to use as inspiration we're giving you words that are 1) Alphabetical, and 2) All about scrapping/photo techniques or types of scrapbook page. They are mostly techniques that you'll already know and where you don't know them we'll provide the tutorial. Plus there's plenty of help available on the Digi Scrapping Divas Facebook group, of course!

By the time we get to September - when we have another fun month of challenges planned - you will have tried a whole lot of techniques you'd never thought of using.

Here's the list:

Each day on the Facebook group we'll give you hints/links to the tutorial and suggest alternatives if you're completely stuck. You can still use the words for inspiration, for example the word "texture" could be a photo of a child's favourite blankie as well as a textured paper on the page.

You'll see we're determined to get you using quickpages and Picmonkey. There are plenty of links to free quickpages in the Freebies group and everything we'll show you on Picmonkey is free. The conversations that  go

"How did you do that?"
"In Picmonkey. It's easy and it's free"
"Oh, I don't use Picmonkey"

are getting silly. Why would peeps not use something that's free in order to do what they want to do?

Hint: Never let a control freak make the monthly word list ...

Totally Tropical

A "think outside the box and go backwards" two part tutorial! I've talked a lot about using reduced opacity backgrounds in my layouts and that's easy to do but some designers actually do the work for you and provide a "faded" background in the kit. CatDesignz has one in the Totally Tropical kit. I leapt on this for a page of hibiscus photos but then I wondered what would happen if I tried to "Un-fade it" and use it for an album cover. This was the result:



I changed the background in Picmonkey (the free version you don't need to upgrade) and that tutorials is HERE.

Then I made the page in MyMemories and used the adjusted background to make a shadow box frame. you can see that tutorial HERE. It also tells you how to change the shadows on the elements and make your butterfly fly above the page.