Christmas Time is Coming...

I have spent the last few weeks decking the halls, geesh seems as though I could go on and on, thought I would share just a few with you. My husband thinks I have gone mad by the time the middle of December rolls around, but that is just the way it goes at my house. I love going through all the old and new decorations every year and remembering where they have all come from. It certainly is a special time of year. I have this huge walk in closest filled to the brim with everything Christmas and I couldn't possibly put it all out, so I change it up every year and rotate the boxes so the following year it is all new to us again. My daughter so wants to come over and go through the decorations and start taking some home with her but I just haven't been able to bring myself to that point yet. One of these days we may get there, but not ready yet.

Here is my one staple that is a must every year, my old~fashioned red and green tree.

Some of the pretty ornaments I have received in our art exchanges in Christmas past! They are so beautiful and so much fun to pull out every year and look at.

I purchased a black tree two years ago and I love it. I couldn't get a good picture of it no matter how hard I try. Been trying for two years and will have to keep trying. LOL...I took a few close-ups of it to make myself feel better.

Even the bears are waiting on Santa.

Oh Max!!!!!

This is our sweet little guy that we adopted from his rescue home last week. He is three and has a mind of his own. He is cute and he is bossy. LOL... We are having lots of fun with him and he is loving all the attention he is getting. I stuffed all the doggie toys (minus about ten) in a bag and put them in this basket where he couldn't get them. He doesn't like Colby or Zoie playing with his toys and he destroyed two of their's yesterday so we went into hiding mode. He found the basket, couldn't ge to it and barked and barked and jumped. Tom got up and put him in the basket where he was happy to stay. He is a real little goofy.

Out Of Bounds!!!

This is an Out of Bounds picture made in PSE 7 for my class homework.

Find original photo below.

This photo was taken by Carly at Opaques Studios.

This is an Out of Bounds that I done of the bridge picture below in photoshop! These are so cool and lots of fun to make.

Original taken by Carly at Opaque Studios!

You can find her work here:

http://www.opaquestudios.net/

My Learning to Love Layers class is coming to an end and what a great class it has been. I have been taking the classes by Sara Froelich over at LVS Online you can find it here:

http://www.lvsassociates.com/

and they are reasonable and Sara is an awesome teacher.

Remembering Pleasantville

Well blog~hopping I found a new site, new to me anyways! I see they are celebrating their first birthday so obviously I am a year behind! Better late than never, I suppose.

Anyways, they do a weekly challenge on Friday and supply either the background or a photo that you have to use in your artwork. This week they supplied the beautiful lady you see in my collage. I decided to play and made this Remembering Pleasantville digi collage for my first attempt.

You can find all the great artwork here:

http://artcreationsfriday.blogspot.com/2009/11/hoera-acf-is-jarig.html

The elements I used for my collage are by Idgie!

More photo fun!!

After some playing with filters!

Original photo by Carly at Opaque Studios

Playing with lots of different filters on this piece. Photo by Opaque Studios.

PSE Learn to Love Layers

The photo of the girls was taken by my niece Carly and the flowers by Athena. This technique is combining two or more photos into one. I faded the rose photo in the girls three times to get this effect. Pretty easy to do and I love the effect.

This is two images the background is another of Athena's pictures and the angel is actually a picture of my niece Lisa, that was taken by another of my nieces, Carly at Opaque Studios. We had to use a displacement map for this lesson. Kind of fun to play with the photo's like this.

This is a photo of our adopted daughter, as we love to call her Athena. I stole this pic from her to use for this particular technique which is adding photo edges.

I am busy taking a PSE class over at LVS Online, having lots of fun too...hehehe...

Lesson 3 was fabulous and I thought I would share my pics with you. Remember I am very much in the learning stage, but I guess we have to start somewhere.

Photoshop Fun

I was playing in photoshop yesterday. So thought I would share what I created. I used a picture of my great-nephew and elements from E-lena at Pickleberrypop.

My niece is a photographer and she is turning out some amazing work. Be sure to check out her website here:

http://www.opaquestudios.net/

Here is PickleBerry Pop address:

http://www.pickleberrypop.com/