Author: The Digital Press

Feature Friday | Karla Noél

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Feature Friday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am super excited to be showcasing the very talented Karla Noél! This is Karla’s second feature here at TDP (you can find her first feature article from October 2016 HERE)… and whereas last year we used our feature series to help you get to know some fun trivia about your favorite designers — this year, we’re going to use our designer feature series to give you a little peek into our designers’ creative spaces, and more insight into their creative processes.

With that in mind, we asked Karla to give us a little peek into her creative workspace. She just recently moved, however, and so nowadays her “current workspace” is actually just her sketchbook, according to her. Here’s a little look at some of her creative magic taking place with pen and paper…

We also asked Karla to share with us a Top 5 list that is representative of her at this point in her life, and this is what she came up with…

Karla’s Top 5 List of Tunes She Loves to Listen To While Designing…

  1. When It’s Only Me and the Music by Jem and the Holograms
  2. Nicotine by Panic at the Disco
  3. One Moment in Time by Whitney Houston
  4. Middle Finger by Bohnes
  5. Go the Distance by Michael Bolton

She also shared some fun trivia/information about herself, for those who are new to her designs, given that she’s been on a design hiatus for the better part of this past year or two. So as a bonus, for those who don’t already know Karla… here’s an update! 🙂

  • I’m a self-taught jack-of-all-trades designer since 2003. Thanks to Google, coffee, and the passion for creative everything.
  • Since then, I have had my biggest blessings… 5 wonderful children, including 2 sets (!) of twins.
  • With digital designs and scrapbook pages… I only make pages with my own designs. Not because I don’t like the design of others… but because I know exactly what I like, and so I just make it myself! LOL
  • I was going strong for years… but since 2007, my personal life was falling apart, and after 11 years of marriage, my husband left us in September 2014. That’s when I stopped designing regularly 🙁 …and lost so much, from my belongings, to my van, my home, and my children.
  • I’m slowly working on coming back! Taking my time… making sure it feels right… finding myself after all these years. I’m finding that I have naturally evolved into a new designer with a different outlook. A new me… hoping that I will be accepted by the creative community once more, when I make it back. It helps having a creative fiancé, too! <3 hehe

As for Karla’s design style… it is distinctly her own. From her use of color to her fantastic hand-drawn elements and word art stamps… you can always recognize Karla’s products as being hers!

Here are just a few of my favorite products by Karla Noél…

Also, here’s a look at just a small sampling of the gorgeous projects that have been created using Karla’s products…

Isn’t it all so fun and inspiring? 🙂

I hope you enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about Karla and looking into her creative space! I have great news — because during her entire feature week, you will find all of Karla’s products on sale 30% OFF in her shop at The Digital Press! (the sale will end at 11:59pm ET on Thursday 4/20). Check your wishlist, and don’t miss out on this great chance to clear your favorite items off it — at a discount!

Additionally, this week only — you can snag Karla’s “Epic.Ness” Collection for FREE with any $10+ purchase in the Karla Noél shop at The Digital Press (this offer also ends at 11:59pm ET on Thurs 4/20)…

Gaelle About the author Gaelle is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press. She lives in France with her hubby, her two sons and her kitty. She loves digiscrap and discovered this activity in 2012, since she’s totally addict and scrap to keep memory her everyday life. Her family is definitively her principal source of inspiration.

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Hybrid How-To | Custom Watercolor Tags

Hello everyone! It’s Saturday, and time for another edition of Hybrid How-To… and today I’m going to show you how to use digital stamps to create customized tags (and/or other projects).

Supplies Needed

  • Digital stamps (I used stamps from Speechies and Love This by Rachel Hodge, and also This Life March Stamps from the Juno Designs shop)
  • Digital Kit (I used In Living Colour by KimB Designs)
  • Watercolor paints or distress inks
  • Laser printer
  • Optional — Minc foiling machine

Instructions

I used Microsoft Word to create my project… but of course you can use just about any word processing or image editing software. You will need to arrange your elements (stamps, etc.) on the page in a way that is conducive to printing. Don’t forget to leave some white space around each element (and around the outer edge of the page as a margin).

*TIP*  In Word, I set the ‘Wrap Text’ option to ‘In Front of Text’ so as to be able to easily move the elements around on the page.

If  you have access to a laser printer, then you can print your document before painting. However, if you only have an inkjet printer, you must decorate your page first before printing or your images will run.

Once you have your stamps printed… you can let your creativity run wild! Use watercolor paints (or similarly-styled inks) to create unique backgrounds. Here’s a look at what I did…


*TIP* Use washi tape or masking tape to secure your page to a board or desk. This will help the paper stay flat (rather than curling).

Color your tags as you wish — use ombre effects, splotches, etc. — it’s up to you. I even left a few of my images blank so that I could color them in after I had cut out the pieces.

When you’ve finished, carefully remove the tape and allow to dry. It’s a good idea to place a heavy book on top to keep the paper flat.

OPTIONAL EXTRA STEP — Because I used a laser printer, I could add foil to my pieces using a Minc machine. To do this, you place the foil on top of the paper and feed it through the machine. The foil reacts with the toner… which melts and grabs the foil. Foil is available in a rainbow of colour and adds a real luxury to your pieces. Check this out…

Finally, you will cut out your pieces (adding extra color or ink as you wish). You can die cut or use a cutting machine to get really creative if you wish.

Here, you can see that I created a card with one of my tags…

You can also add them to scrapbook pages, pocket scrapping projects, or even planner pages! Here’s a look at a few pieces I thought could work well in a memory planner…

Isn’t this easy and fun? Now you can create something unique with your digital stamps, and hold the end-product in your hands!

Want to give this project a try? You can earn challenge points towards the April 2017 challenges here at The Digital Press if you share your finished projects with us. Check out our monthly challenge information in the CROSSWORD SECTION of the forum.

MoragAbout the Author  Morag Cutts is part of the Hybrid Creative Team here at Digital Press. Morag has been an avid scrapper and photographer for ten years.  Although she adores the flexibility and creativity of digital, Morag can’t resist playing with paper and embellishments – so hybrid scrapping is the perfect medium for her!  Morag lives in the UK with her hubby, two kids and recently adopted puppy.

 

Feature Friday | Dunia Designs

It’s time for another edition of our Feature Friday series here at The Digital Press… and this week, we are excited to feature Dunia from Dunia Designs here on The Digital Press blog! This is Dunia’s  second feature here on the blog (you can find her first feature from September  2016 HERE)… and whereas last year we used our feature series to help you get to know some fun trivia about your favorite designers… this year, we’re going to use our designer feature series to give you a little peek into our designers’ creative spaces and more insight into their creative processes.

With that in mind, we asked Dunia to show us her creative space — where she works to come up with all of her fantastic digital designs. This is such a great, clean, simple work space (you should see mine, in comparison!).  And doesn’t this space perfectly reflect her design style, which is also clean and simple?! 🙂

We also asked Dunia to give us a “Top 5” list that is representative of her at this point in life, and she gave us a list of her Top 5 of her Favorite Pastimes:

  1. Reading: At the moment, she reads “The Terrifying Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.” Since she wants to improve her English, she reads a lot at the moment.
  2. Walking: She loves to walk with her friends in her neighborhood.
  3. Playing: She loves playing with her kids. During the winter, they play a lot of board games… like Clue, Monopoly, Jingo, etc.
  4.  Netflix: She is addicted to Netflix. A few of her favorite series and films are: Sherlock, House of Cards, and Stranger Things (among others).
  5. Listen to music: She is a Rock-n-Roll person, and especially loves older music from artists like Led  Zeppelin, Metallica, Motorhead, ACDC, etc.

 

As for her digital design style… Dunia creates beautiful kits and collections that are perfect for traditional digital scrapbooking pages, as well as for pocket scrapping-style layouts and projects. She is known for her fantastic pocket cards. Whether you are a scrapper who is documenting everyday life… or individual holidays, vacations, or events… her products are perfect for clean and simple-style scrappers.

Here are just a few of my favorite items from Dunia’s shop at The Digital Press…

Dunia Designs‘ products are super versatile and easy to use for all kinds of projects. Here is a look at a sampling of just a few of our favorite projects using Dunia’s products…

I hope you enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about Dunia Designs, as well as getting a look at her work space and some of her amazing products! And as if that wasn’t enough fun… her entire shop will be 30% OFF throughout this coming week (the sale will end at 11:59pm ET on Thursday 4/13)!

Additionally, this week only — you can snag Dunia’s “My Kind of Day” Collection for FREE with any $10+ purchase in the Dunia Design shop at The Digital Press (this offer also ends at 11:59pm ET on Thurs 4/13)…

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About the author  Astrid is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press. She lives with her husband and her 2 teenage/adult kids in Germany. As a mini-jobber with only 10 hours/week, she has plenty of time for her digital scrapbooking hobby. She has Netflix and Amazon Prime, and is addicted to nearly all series. Vampires, zombies, vikings… it doesn’t matter; she likes everything. She loves the ocean and the summer heat, but lives in the opposite: mountains. Therefore, she loves visiting her family in Algeria or the south of France.

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Tutorial Tuesday | Scraplifting Yourself

Welcome to another installment of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am here to advocate for a simple technique that will help you create more scrapbook pages (and faster, and more easily!) — scraplifting yourself.

I would like to use this post to encourage you to be gentle on yourself and not feel as though every layout you create has to be a masterpiece… while also helping you to avoid feeling as though creating layouts leaves you feeling drained. It’s a hobby and it should be fun, right?

Let’s be honest… life is busy, and there are so many things that have to be done all the time. Often we find that by the time we sit down at the computer to take advantage of a few moments of crafty “me time,” our creative energy seems to have dissipated.

How to solve this?

You can always turn to your tried-and-true sources for inspiration. I love The Digital Press Gallery; Pinterest is another fun source of ideas (as is Instagram, as people are posting their scrapbooking creations there more and more often all the time nowadays!). Sometimes, though, I find that I use up all of my scrapping time just looking at other people’s layouts without doing anything with my own photos and getting any of my stories told. Oops! This ends up leaving me feeling despondent and uncreative.

An easy fix for me is to choose the photos I want to scrapbook, and then look at my own arsenal of previous layouts… with the goal being to re-create one that uses the same number of photos, along w/ a new/different kit or collection. I just clip (Ctrl-G) the new papers and photos over the existing ones, and swap out the embellishments with new items from the kit I am working with the second time around.

For example, let’s take this layout that I created for TDP’s 3-for-3 challenge in March 2017…

Characteristics of This Layout:

  • 3 photos
  • 3 different patterned papers
  • visual triangle of clusters
  • engaging title
  • complimentary colours of red and blue
  • right-aligned journaling

I still love this layout, and so for the next layout I had just 30 minutes to create and I started with 3 photos of my grandnieces playing outside of the holiday house we shared in December.

I kept the placement of just about everything exactly the same –the photos, papers and journaling — and I changed up the date, etc. Instead of creating a new title, I used a pre-designed piece of word art from the newest TDP Designer Collaboration “Fresh Air“. I still have foundation layers of paint and a scatter. Three points of orange, with a fourth embellishment spot that is tone-on-tone blue to break boundaries and add a different shaped element for interest. I added shadows as I went along… and in 30 minutes, it was finished and ready to be printed!

Here’s a look…

Again, Characteristics of This Layout:

  • 3 photos
  • 3 patterned papers
  • visual triangle of orange
  • wordart title
  • complimentary colours of blue and orange
  • centered journaling

I decided to use this page’s composition one more time. For this last layout, we had a family BBQ on the day before we left Johannesburg and I wanted to highlight the men’s role in cooking and that the women had a relaxed off duty kind of day. 🙂

For this newest page, I wanted to include a 4th photo of my hubby grilling the meat… so I nudged the photos to the right and squeezed him in there. You can see more similarities with the second layout than the first, including white piece of word art layered over the photo, and centered journaling. Of course, these layouts look strikingly similar — but you could also mix things up by turning the design 90 degrees, or by flipping the paper layers found at the top to the bottom of the page, instead (or changing up the font, etc.). I went for speed over creativity, though, and as these layouts will be separated within the family album of 2016 with different opposing layouts I can almost bet that no one will even notice that they’re almost the same…

Characteristics of This Third Layout:

  • 4 photos
  • 3 patterned papers
  • diagonal/asymmetrical points of pink
  • Blue, green and pink
  • wordart title and sub-titles
  • centered journaling

What do you think? Do you have 30 minutes to spare, in which you want to complete a brand-new layout in just that short time? This technique will help you do so! Just turn to a tried-and-true layout design that you already love… open that PSD or TIF file… remove the papers and embellishments… and start again!

If you give this a try, I’d love to see your results! Feel free to load your layouts to The Digital Press Gallery, and you can even link us up to the original layout in your credits/description if you want to.

 About the Author  Stefanie is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press Co. She is a mom of three older children, all living in Cape Town, South Africa, with her hubby of 29 years and their two cats. In her free time she loves digital scrapbooking, dabbling in photography and reading.

Feature Friday | Laura Banasiak

It’s time for another edition of our Feature Friday series here at The Digital Press… and this week, I am excited to feature Laura Banasiak here on the blog! This is Laura’s second feature here on the blog (you can find her first feature from June 2016 HERE), and whereas last year we used our feature series to help you get to know some fun trivia about your favorite designers… this year, we’re using our designer feature series to give you a little peek into our designers’ creative spaces, as well as more insight into their creative processes.

With that in mind, we asked Laura to give us a peek into her creative space (a.k.a. “where the magic happens”!)… but she did even better than that! Just wait until you see this! 🙂

According to Laura, “My work space is really wherever I can manage to hide away from my kids for a few minutes with my laptop. Someday maybe I’ll work at a desk again… but in the meantime… my computer’s desktop background (above) is a photo from this past weekend’s “Heroes and Villains Fan Fest” in Chicago. My boyfriend and I have been working disability services at the conventions for the last three years… although last year’s convention didn’t go as planned, as we ended up missing out on it after my water broke at the venue and our little guy Ryker (in photo, above, held by actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Walking Dead) was born that day. We like to keep things interesting! Ryker is now the unofficial adorable Chicago convention mascot!”

Here are a few other photos Laura shared with us from the most recent convention she just attended… how fun is this?!

We also asked Laura to give us a “Top 5” list that is representative of her at this point in life, and this was what she came up with… Laura’s Top 5 Bands!

  1. Walk Off the Earth
  2. Deftones
  3. Incubus
  4. Avanged Sevenfold
  5. 10 Years

As for Laura’s designs… her kits are always full of colorful and funky elements, loads of hand-drawn doodles, and various hand-crafted artsy elements. In addition to digital kits, she also creates awesome fonts, alphas, and word art sets… all of which have a very special style that is all her own, and you can usually recognize her products without even seeing her name on the packaging. I love working with her products, because Laura creates all kinds of goodies!

I picked some of my favorite products to share with you from Laura Banasiak’s store here at The Digital Press…

Her products are super versatile and easy to use for all kinds of projects. Aren’t they fun?

I also pulled together a sampling of some really fantastic, creative projects that use Laura’s products…

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about Laura Banasiak and getting a peek into her creative space! To celebrate her week as our Featured Designer here at The Digital Press, her entire store will be 30% OFF all week long (the sale will end at 11:59 ET on Thursday 4/6).

Additionally, this week only — you can snag Laura’s brand-new, just-released “Little Crab” Mini Kit for FREE with any $10+ purchase in the Laura Banasiak shop at The Digital Press (this offer also ends at 11:59pm ET on Thurs 4/6)…

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About the Author  Miranda is mom of two teenage boys, aged 14 and 16 years old, and is also a fur-mummy for her 3 Bernese Mountain Dogs. She lives in the South of the Netherlands, close to the beach where she loves to walk with her dogs. In real life she is HSE-responsible for few companies in the construction industry. She loves to read Danielle Steel novels, long walks at the beach and she loves Italy; and has been digiscrap-addicted since 2007.

Feature Friday | Wildheart Designs

It’s time for another edition of Feature Friday here at The Digital Press… and this week, I am excited to feature Lisa Sisneros of Wildheart Designs here on the blog! This is Lisa’s second feature here on the blog (you can find her first feature from August 2016 HERE), and whereas last year we used our feature series to help you get to know some fun trivia about your favorite designers, this year we’re using our designer feature series to give you a little peek into our designers’ creative spaces and also some more insight into their creative processes.

With that in mind, check out Lisa’s creative space… isn’t it great?! I can definitely see how this space would be conducive to the creative flow…

 

We also asked Lisa for a “Top 5” list related to things that define her at this point in her life, and this was what she came up with — the “Top 5 List of Things She Loves” (I’m sure we can all relate to most all of these! Her love of “hot pink anything” certainly speaks for itself in her creative space)…

  1. Hot Pink anything
  2. The Red Queen book series
  3. Naps
  4. This Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Muffin Recipe
  5. Unicorns (still!)

 

As for Lisa’s design style… she creates digital products that are “paper-realistic” in style, with lots of fun themed items and textured elements that are perfect for layering. Here is just a small sampling of what you will find in the Wildheart Designs shop at The Digital Press…

 

And here are just a handful of sample layouts using Lisa’s designs, so you can get a peek at her fantastic designs in action…

 

I hope you enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about Lisa (and looking into her fabulous creative space!), and I am sure that you will have no problem finding some new favorites in her shop at The Digital Press which will be 30% OFF all week long during her Feature week (the sale will end at 11:59 EST on Thursday 3/30)! Check your wishlist, and don’t miss out on this great chance to clear it out at a discounted rate!

Additionally, this week only — you can snag Lisa’s “Oh, Joy!” Kit for FREE with any $10+ purchase in the Wildheart Designs shop at The Digital Press (this offer also ends at 11:59pm ET on Thurs 3/30)…

About the author   Rae is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press. She is a Mom of three daughters, grandmother to 2. She lives in west central Indiana with her hubby of almost 24 years and their youngest daughter. She is a digi-scrap addict and a bit of a computer software geek, having worked for several years as a software/IT administrator/architect. She loves any opportunity to travel with her hubby who travels most every week for work. Her family are definitely the loves of her life and she is loving life as a “MomMom” as her grandchildren lovingly refer to her.