iPad Scrapping with Art Studio

I recently made the wonderful discovery that ArtStudio is an amazing iPad app for scrapbooking. Last summer I took iScrapIt at Renee Pearson's. It was a fantastic class teaching how to scrap on an iPad using Keynote.

The pages work well with a small amount of trimming printed out as a landscape 8.5x11 photobook. They can also be added to a 12x12 page in Photoshop or PSE.

But since Keynote is designed to be a program for creating presentations, it doesn't have the artsy features like blend modes, masks, and adjustment layers.

But the latest version of ArtStudio has all that and more!

The page above was created today using ArtStudio and items from Anna Aspnes's This Crazy Life. Her ArtsyKardz are almost the right proportions for the iPad (I'm using a first generation iPad, so I have fewer pixels on my screen than the new version - if you're lucky enough to have the new one, you will have to adjust accordingly), and.since ArtStudio reads PNG files, all elements from a kit are also accessible.

I still have some work to do on the page, mainly cleaning up the layer mask. I took full advantage of blending modes and adjustments to create the page.

I plan on doing a small series of posts on scrapping in ArtStudio in case any iPad users who scrap happen to stumble here.

Next up: prepping the kit for iPad use and making them accessible to Art Studio.

Patti
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Playing

I've been playing all afternoon with an assignment from the Color Confidence class at Renee Pearson's great online classroom.

Our assignments have largely been related to various ways to pick color palettes. The teacher, Cilenia Curtis  is a digital designer and artist. An assignment for this week, the last in the class, was to create a color palette using various combinations on the color wheel, and then to create some artsy papers using brushes, overlays, textures, and blend modes. 

I started off picking a hue of blue that I wanted to work with, and went from there. The photo shows my color wheel picks, and some of the papers I created using these colors. I went with the tints because I generally like my background papers to be just that - in the background. The papers are not repeats of one another with just a color change - I took the time to change brush layers and blend modes, etc. so there would be a variety in more than just the color.

I highly recommend the class when it comes around again. 

Trish, they're in Dropbox if you want them.

Patti

iPad Scrapping

One thing that is new in my life is scrapping on the iPad. I recently took iScrapIt taught by Renée Pearson. Class is over now, but she will be offering it again, so watch her site or sign up for emails so you don't miss it. If you've got an iPad, and you scrap, you want this class!

 I've been wanting to scrap on my iPad since I first purchased it. I knew there had to be a way to do it, but I didn't have the know how to figure out which program would work. Having almost no experience with creating presentations, I never even thought of using Keynote.

Keynote is a presentation program for Mac OS, and there is a very functional version available for the iPad. It makes creating grid-based layouts on the iPad very easy and quick. Keynote comes with twelve themes, each with their own color palette and photo style, but these can all be switched up and altered with a little know-how. Custom colors aren't possible, but the range of hues and tones is quite large, so it's not really limiting. Hopefully in a future version, Apple will allow custom color palettes.

These layouts are not in a standard size for printing, but they are close to an 8.5 x 11 landscape. One of the things we learned is how to use the layout done on the iPad to make a 12x12 page. Here's an example of the Teton Park layout put on a 12x12 page.

I find Keynote a great way to create an album on the go. I'm considering just getting all my vacation pages printed in an 8.5 x 11 format as a photo book. 

We also learned how to change the file size of our digi supplies to a size that works perfectly on the iPad. This means that, with a little planning, pages can be quite artsy or embellished.

Another discovery I made is that the popular card size many digital creators are making for Project Life are great for using as background in Keynote. They do have to be rotated to landscape, so I look for designs that will rotate well.

Here's a layout I made using Anna Aspnes' Salty Living ArtsyKardz & a bit of lace from the kit:

Needless to say, I'm having a good time with this!

PowerScrapIt!

Katie the Scrapbook Lady recently announced Power Scrap It, a set of actions for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Having recently taken her Digi Power Scrapping class at Big Picture Classes, I was sure this would be good, so I bought them.

I've been playing around with them a bit since I purchased them last night, and I know I'm going to use these actions all the time. They make is so fast and easy to put a layout together, especially using templates, which I do much of the time.

I did this layout in about 15 minutes, from start to finish, including locating the photo and converting it to black and white:

Papers and embellishments are from this lovely kit by Lynn Grievson

Granted, I didn't do any journaling, which would have taken a few more minutes.

My favorite actions are for batch adding files to the layout. They bring in entire folders of files, and I used them to bring in the whole digit kit I had chosen. I wasn't sure this was going to be terribly helpful to me, having so many layers to sort through. But after watching Wendy's video that comes with the actions, I was blown away with how quick and easy it is to try various papers and embellishments and place them on the page.

There is one action I wish was included, which would be to delete the hidden layers. I already have an action from someone else that does this, but it would be nice to have in the set.

I also wish that the action to begin with a template closed the original file. As it is now, it opens the template but also leave the original file open.

The conclusion is that this action set is so completely worth the $9.99 price (currently on special at that price).