be AUDacious

new releases: Mama Loves You & 3 new templates

I've got another big release for the shop this week: a new kit and three new templates. I've got lots of inspiration layouts to share with you (my amazing team has been BUSY!) so we'll get right to it. Just remember, new releases are 30% off until midnight tonight, so if you're looking for a deal, BUY NOW!

My newest kit, Mama Loves You, combines some of my favorite colors (red, orange, and green, with a couple of pops of pink), cork-textured elements, and a subway word art block that I adore. You can purchase it as a full kit, or you can buy it separately (papers and elements).

The Tiny Blocks template gives you space for three photos (the shadowed frames are included in the template), plus space to feature a number of smaller pieces of patterned papers. Add tiny embellishments to the blocks, and finish it off with a large title in the middle and some paper pieces down the side (stitching included). 

by Melanie: I love how she substituted the subway word art in place of one of the paper blocks, and just moved the row of tiny blocks to a vertical alignment instead of horizontal. 

 by Anna: Anna deleted a couple of paper blocks, added some brushwork, and created a great diagonal line to draw your eye from one corner to the other. 

 The 4 Tags template features four shipping tags with flair accents and space for Instagram-sized photos.

from Aria: I love how Aria used a variety of patterns from the Mama Loves You kit for her tags and placed the cork banner across the entire page.
 

 from Jen H: I love how Jen added the stitching on top of her tags, which use the solid papers from the kit. It adds a great bit of visual interest and I think the result is super-cute!
 

 

 The Stacked Up template is an 8.5x11 inch layout that can easily be converted to a 12x12 canvas. The following layouts all use the template, and I love seeing how each person has modified it to fit their needs.

by Celeste: Celeste shrank the layers down a bit and rotated the layout for a horizontal orientation before placing it in a lower right-hand position on her page.

by Jen P: Jen switched to a 12x12 size and moved the layers to the left-hand side of her layout. She also blended the gray paper with the wood-patterned paper from my Whiteout kit for her background, and used the subway word art in place of some of the papers. Great touches!


by Becca: Becca paired the Mama Loves You kit with one of the kraft papers from my Neutral Stock paper pack -- the colors and textures look gorgeous together. 

by Claudia: I love how she chopped up the word art and used the phrases on the various pieces of paper in the template -- awesome idea!



 by Katherine: Kat rotated the design for a horizontal orientation and then loaded on the embellishments -- that's the great thing about templates. You can make them as simple or elaborate as you'd like! 


Don't forget about my $Deal product: Tag Team Templates (on sale for $1.00 ending tonight!),  and the Pop A Cork alphabet would make a great addition to layouts created with the Mama Loves You kit. In face, they make such a great pair that I'm offering you a coupon code good for 25% off the alphabet; just enter the code corkDHDalpha2012 at checkout. Code expires 7/23/2012.

Additional products used in these layouts include:

InLinkz.com

Tuesday $$ Deals: Tag Team Templates (and a tutorial, too!)

(I've really got to stop it with the alliteration on these Tuesday $$ Deal posts...the last post was just as bad!)

I ADORE this week's $ kit; I think these little tag templates are SO flexible and fun! I can't wait to see what you make with them! The House Decorators and my creative team came up with some awesome layouts -- take a look!

by Becca -- I love how she clustered all the tags together and used screws to attach them to the wood background. The Camp Currie and In the Moment kits work perfectly with those swimming photos too!
(additional credits: alpha and paint splatters from Be You)

by Rachel -- This page is so lovely. The tags line up perfectly, and all the little details (buttons, tags, embellished words) lead your eye directly to that beautiful photo. I love the soft brush in the background and the hint of pattern on the blue paper too.
(credits: I Do kit and freebie, Painterlays, Iconic Banners, paint and edge from By Your Side Bits, recolored tape from Celebrate)

by Missy -- Missy noted that she'd print this page as a 6x6; she loves using the tag as a major focal point and thinks it would look awesome as part of series of smaller pages, bound into an album or framed. I have to agree!
(credits: Flight Path kit)

by Liz -- Liz's page uses a number of different items, many from a new kit that will be releasing in my shop on Thursday, so consider this to be your SNEAK PEEK! :) Hope you like what you see!
(additional credits: Garden Party Alphabet)

I wanted to share a quick tutorial with you; last week, I posted a great layout from House Decorator Carey, using my Sports Fanatic bundle. There are lots of great details on Carey's layout, but the one I love the most is how she combined two different flairs to create an element that perfectly matched the team's colors (blue and gold).

Here's how she did it (I'm using PSE 5.0):

1. Open the two flair elements that you want to combine. (NOTE: With the Pennant Pieces kit, each flair comes in two types: a white base with a colored image, and a colored base with a white image. There are also 5 different colors to choose from: red, blue, yellow, green, black. 15 different sports are represented.) For our example, we're going to place the blue image onto the yellow flair.

2. Select the Magic Wand Tool (use keyboard shortcut W) from your toolbar along the left side of your screen. Pull up the blue and white track image. Click anywhere on the image that is blue. This will cause "marching ants" (a dotted outline) to appear around that blue image.

3. As you'll see, though, only a portion of the image is selected. With the image still selected, right click. When the drop down menu appears, choose "SIMILAR." This will select all the other parts of the image that are the same color blue. (Hint: If you repeat this step, it will continue to pick up more bits of blue color on the image).

4. Right click again and choose "LAYER VIA COPY." This will make a duplicate layer of the selected image. If the selection didn't pick up the entire image (you can see that some of the track image, for example, is closer to white because of the flair highlights), then choose the portion of the image that wasn't selected the first time around and repeat steps 3 and 4. (HINT: Make sure that the original image is your active layer, NOT the copy layer. If you have to make more than one copy, you'll want to merge CTRL+E those layers until you have one full copy.)

5. Drag the copy on top of the yellow flair and position it so that it overlaps the white image. Once you have it positioned where you'd like it to go, just merge your layers and save the image under a NEW FILE NAME. Do not save over the original!

 

Friday Freebie: Daily Overlays

I love adding frames and notes to my photos with Photoshop -- it's one of my favorite things to do to add a little "something extra" to my pictures, especially when the plan is just to post them to my blog or Facebook, rather than scrapbooking them. I particularly love the look of low-opacity words or images laid over my photos, so that the colors and images can still peek through. That's why I decided to offer up a set of Daily Overlays for this week's Friday Freebie -- these are perfect for using in Project Life, on your blog, or as part of any other memorykeeping projects you might be working on.

They are super-simple to use. They're already sized to 4x6 inches, so you just need to open your photo in Photoshop (or whatever editing program you use), and then drag and drop the frame on top. The opacity has already been lowered for you, but if you want it lighter, you can make that adjustment yourself. Want it darker? Just duplicate the layer (so that you can have two copies).

To download the freebie, just click on the preview below. 

new release: Sports Fanatic

I absolutely can't wait until the Olympics are here! We watched as much of the Olympic trials as we could, and I felt such a rush of excitement as I watched these athletes put it all on the line, hoping to earn a spot on the Olympic team. Both of my daughters are athletes, and I just can't imagine the number of hours it takes to perform at the Olympic level -- and I think we're busy enough as it is. 

So this new kit is a nod to the Olympics, but it was also created out of my own necessity -- as a set of products I would love to use on my own sports pages. Right now, we're a three-sport family (soccer, cross-country, and track). As you'll see from the sample layouts I've posted, though, many of the papers and elements in this kit are completely flexible and can be used for just about any topic.

For today only, Sports Fanatic is priced at 30% off; you can purchase the bundle, or you can purchase the papers, elements, word art, and pennants separately. I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love to see how you use it.

Jen and Rachel's layouts both use my Clipped Frames, which work particularly well with this kit. So well, in fact, that I'm offering you a coupon code to get 20% off the frames. The code will expire 7/16/12.

Here's a look at some layouts by the House Decorators and by my creative team -- there are so many unique ways to use this kit! I'm really inspired by so many of their details and little touches!

by Jen H (I love how she ghosted the subway art over the photo, and the simple banner pennant in the top corner with the baseball flair -- great touches!)

by Rachel (My favorite part? The way the grid paper shows through on the large top photo -- such an awesome touch!)

by Claudia (The brads for the label holders make great "thumbtacks" to hold the journaling card in place -- gives this layout the feel of a bulletin board with memorabilia included!)

 by Shannon (Lots of pieces from this kit will work wonderfully with Project Life. The photo cards and the word art are sized at 3x4, so you can easily include them on your PL layouts.)

by Carey (Look at the way she combined two different colors of flair -- blue and yellow -- to personalize her layout. Handy work with the extraction tool -- I love it!)

 by Mary (I love how Mary used one of the triangle banners as an arrow, and drew attention to her son's medal with the circle stitches -- such awesome details!)

 from Jennifer (Love how Jennifer lets that word art take center stage -- what a fantastic design, with the large photo and the paper strips):

 from Liz (an excellent multi-photo layout; I love the flair in each of the four corners!):

by Missy (I love how she used the pennant circle to mark the date, rather than a sport flair or an award -- the banner across the top of the photo looks fab too!):


 

Winner: Sports Fanatic!

Cheryl, please email me at audneal at gmail dot com, and I'll get your download code to you! Thanks again to everyone who entered -- here's a look at a couple of layouts created with the kit, which will be releasing tomorrow at 30% off!

from Becca:

from Celeste:

coming soon: sports fanatic

Want a chance to win it before it releases? This bundled sports kit could be yours -- just leave a comment below, telling me your favorite sport to watch during the Olympic Games. All comments must be entered by midnight EST on Tuesday night (7.10.12). I'll use random.org to select a winner and post the announcement on Wednesday. For 3 additional chances to enter, spread the word about the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, and/or your blog; leave a link to each post in the comments section.

Friday Freebie: Daily Frames

We're celebrating with family this week, which means lots of photo opportunities! Here's a quick freebie for you to download (just click on the preview to be taken to the download link) -- simple frames for every day of the week, in both vertical and horizontal orientations, sized at 4x6. Enjoy, and don't forget to stop back by on Sunday for a sneak peek at what's coming soon, plus a chance to win!

new releases: Quote Me & Painterlays

I've got two new items available in the shop this week. First up is Quote Me, a simple set of speech-bubble shaped quotes about all kinds of topics. There are 10 quotations included, and they come in two versions: a black speech bubble with white print, and the same speech bubble with the print erased, leaving the negative space behind, so that you can "stamp" them onto cardstocks (kraft looks GREAT!) or photos.

Here's a great page from Melanie, using the Quote Me Word Art, the Whiz Kid kit, and the Miscellaneous template. 

Melanie also created a second page, using the Be You bundled kit:

 The second product is a really flexible set of painted mask templates called Painterlays.  These templates come in four designs: squares, circles, triangles, and the oh-so-trendy hexagons. There's a painted layer, which can be recolored (I'd recommend using this tutorial, steps 1-6), as well as an outline layer. They can be used separately, or together. In addition, you can add patterned paper inside the shapes for extra punch. The creative uses for this product are really unlimited, if you ask me.

Claudia played around with them a couple of different ways; she clipped a chevron patterned paper to the circles, and then added the hand-drawn outlines to a second piece of patterned paper behind the clipped circles (everything is from the Be You kit):

Jen created an awesome look at the many faces of one of her adorable boys by clipping a variety of photos and papers to the squares on one of the Painterlays -- the result is awesome:

House Party: July 2012

That's right -- it's time to kick off summer Design House Digital-style with our July House Party! What's the house party, you ask? It's our monthly designer collaboration -- we pick a theme and a color palette and then the designers go to town, putting together mix-and-match papers, elements, alphabets, and more! And since everything coordinates, you can simply choose a little or a lot from each of the participating designers. Even better, the House Party kits are 30% off for the first 5 days of July, so it's a great time to shop at the House!

This month, I contributed four kits to the House Party: Latticework Papers, Banner Blooms, Summer Jotters, and Garden Party Alphabet. You can purchase them separately, or you can purchase them as one large bundle -- the choice is yours!

Here's some inspiration from the House Decorators and my creative team with these kits (and the rest of the available pieces from other designers too!)

from Celeste:
using ju's papers and journal cards, mye's papers, smears & elements, audrey's banner flowers & papers, robyn's alpha, karen's papers

from Becca:

from Claudia:

 from Shannon:

 

new release: be you

Be authentic. Be bold. Be creative.

Just be.

Be you.

That's the message behind my newest collaboration with Sara Schmutz; it's artsy, messy, colorful, vibrant. And for today only, it's 30% off. Make sure you grab it at the reduced price -- it's a great deal. You've got lots of options, too. You can purchase each part individually: papers, elements, alphabet, words. Or you can purchase the papers and elements together, the words and alpha together, or you can grab the whole big bundle (definitely the best deal of the bunch)!

I love the layouts that my creative team and the House Decorators have come up with for this kit -- they are all so expressive and colorful. Let's take a look:

from Celeste

from Katherine:

 from Wendy:

from Carey: