Latter-day Village Square

We just finished adding the entire line of LDS scrapbooking rubber stamps from Sunbeam Stamps to our online store. Laura Cooke, the designer of these unique stamps has created products that help you LDS scrapbookers and crafters add an LDS flair to your creations. There are over 150 new stamps in the line; here are a few samples:

There is a stamp for almost any occasion or LDS theme, from Primary to Relief Society and Aaronic Priesthood/Young Men to Missionaries. You can create special remembrance scrapbook pages; invitations, place cards, bookmarks … the list is endless. We invite you to look over the whole line.

In our online store, click Scrapbooking in the category list and then Rubber Stamps. Here you will see that we have organized the new stamps by LDS organization or purpose.

You can also click Sunbeam Stamps in the Authors / Brands list to see an ordered list. Be sure and set aside plenty of time as there are over 15 pages of stamps to look at. Please select a few to kick your creativity up a notch!

I’d like to introduce a new artist to our LDV Neighborhood - Elise N. Black!  She has designed the sweetest Mother’s Day Collection that is currently in The Club - and if her illustrations look familiar, it is because she is one of the most frequently used illustrators for the Friend magazine for the past several years!

Elise visited with me a few months ago and I was so delighted with her work, I am just tickled that we can feature some of her work in our Download Depot!

This collection includes both line art and color illustrations, scrapbook papers and some very fun special projects, such as

• Greeting Cards
• Stationary
• Lined envelope
• an adorable Hatbox gift box

I look forward to future collaborations with Elise.  We are planning an LDS ABC Book later this year.

You can see some of her wonderful illustrations on her website - www.illustrationsbyelise.com

~Debra

We’ve just added a new department in our store - Serene Books - Beautifully handcrafted handbound books by Serene Heiner. To start off, Serene has designed several LDS themed books that are now in our store:

• I Am a Child of God
• CTR
• I Love to See the Temple
• Young Women Values

Serene fell in love with book binding after taking the book binding class at BYU while she was working on her graphic design degree. She so excelled that she was invited to teach the course a couple of times since she graduated. My son said he had wanted to take that class - it was a very popular class at BYU and very hard to get a spot in. I attended one of Serene’s classes as her guest one evening - they were doing paste paper that night, a paper decorating technique I had never done before. It was so fun!

Serene has mastered a number of book binding techniques and will continue to add new products, including book binding kits and instructions - as time goes by.

Serene makes custom books for weddings, newborns, missionaries by commission, along with her beautiful hand drawn portraits. Visit her bio page for more information.

I love the dollar store. It is so addictive to walk down the aisles and think - only a $1?!! WOW - I’ll take one of these and one of those - yadda yadda yadda. I saw some brightly colored kiddy clay the other day on one of my vigils at our local dollar store - and since I am the nursery leader, AND an artist, I dropped it in my cart, along with 35 OTHER inexpensive gotta-haves.

So late one night over the Thanksgiving holiday, I couldn’t sleep - VERY typical - and I came downstairs and my son was still awake. I saw that clay there and peeled open the package and started making little clay Christmas figures. He’s an artist too, so I said, - hey - why don’t you make one? So we rolled and squeezed to our hearts content, forming little clay buddies. I don’t have much luck with my digital camera, need to take a class, so instead, when I got one done, I’d lay it on my scanner. The first one, I made the mistake of closing the lid. SQUISH! After that I laid a Kleenex (or cheap knock-off facial tissue from Walmart) over my little pal, and a piece of white paper and did my scanning. Still they got a little squished, but, thanks to AMAZING Adobe Photoshop, my favorite friend, I unsquished the squished places, filled in the cracks, and then adjusted all the colors so our yellow and blue snowman came out white with black trim and an orange carrot nose.

OK - so now I’ve given away my secret - my clay figures ARE computer enhanced, I admit it.

I also wanted to JUMP FOR JOY - because with this Christmas Clay Collection, I’ve finally figured out how to make text follow a path around an object in Photoshop. I knew there HAD to be a way, but could never find the steps to make it happen. DUH - I felt motivated enough to actually use HELP - that curious menu item I almost wholly ignore in about every program I’ve ever owned. You know how most fathers REFUSE to stop and ask directions while traveling in an unfamiliar area - well, in as much as I so admired my dad, I guess I must have adopted that classic male characteristic - at least when it comes to software - anyway - the instructions were right there in Photoshop Help - easy peasy - and what fun I had creating a path around the snowman and writing the cute words to a cute song - I will definitely be using this new found tool again and again!

This collection is exclusive to the Club this month only - I won’t be adding it to the store later on. There are 25 items, which make it perfect for an advent calendar, and there are several nifty scrapbook papers included too.

I wonder what else I might find in the HELP section . . . hmmmm

Debra

Ask and ye shall receive. Timing is, however, important. This is the time of year, or we are just getting to the end of the time of year when the bulk of our seminary subscriptions renew. So, feeling generous, Tim asked if I wanted any new equipment. I thought on it, and saw an ad on my Photoshop User’s magazine for a Wacom Intuos 3 Tablet. I’d been thinking about tablets and had no idea what they cost or which ones were good etc. So I got on their website and read up on this nifty device. After reading third party reviews, I determined this was the industry standard for my needs as a digital artist. So I told Tim and he was happy to oblige me. Two weeks later, a-hem, my tablet arrived from Amazon.com.

The font I designed this month for VDD Club is my first tablet project! I got the 6×8 tablet. The tablet plugs into my computer and with the pen they provide, I can draw on the tablet and it shows up on my monitor. It is a lot easier than using a mouse to draw with. And you can get special effects not possible with a mouse - it is pressure sensitive, and so when I press harder, the brush stroke is wider or darker. I am just learning how to use it, and this font is my first project! It came with some free software. I usually use Adobe Photoshop, but Corel Painter Essentials has some neat effects that Photoshop doesn’t have, and that is what I used to do the DWHScript Font.

Corel Painter Essentials is a beginner version of the more robust professional Corel Painter X. It comes with a large selection of media types - or pen/brush categories, and then within each brush category are several variants. I chose Art Pen Brushes as my brush category and Grainy Edge Calligraphy as my brush variant. Then I started writing my letters on the tablet with the pen it comes with. It was so easy! And if I made a mistake, guess what . . . on that same pen, on the other end is . . . lo and behold . . . an eraser! It works just like a real pen eraser, only better because it leaves behind no marks at all. I still feel more comfy with Photoshop so I saved the file as a jpg and opened it in Photoshop to isolate each letter as a separate file. Then I imported each character into my Font Creator software - had to rotate some letters a bit, sized and spaced them just right and saved and installed my new font! Then I made a sample page and uploaded everything to the website for Club members to download.

Anyway, using my new toy was fun and easy and I’m just getting started.

I’ll let you know how it goes from here.  Oh yeah, about my tablet, lucky for me I have a deep drawer where my keyboard and mouse reside, and the tablet rests either in front of or behind the keyboard just fine, without taking up extra space on my desk.  Otherwise I’d have to put it somewhere else when I wasn’t using it.

Debra

I’ve had a blast designing and preparing the designs of our talented artists for new digital scrapbook collections in our Village Download Depot. I have something to admit - I have little experience making scrapbooks the way most people do. I have a very old fashioned scrapbook from high school, and long before the scrapbook craze began, I made scrapbooks for both my babies (now 27 and 23) and for their missions. But I haven’t bought scrapbook paper or embellishments etc to do it. I decorated them by hand or designed them on my computer myself.

Over the years I have noticed the scrapbook section of the local craft stores I frequent getting larger and larger - taking up more and more floor space. One store has devoted well over 50% of their store to scrapbooking products. It blows my mind.

But right here in the heart of the seedbed for this international passion for scrapbooking, where it all started - along the Wasatch Front - you can hardly find any LDS-themed scrapbook paper or embellishments/tools anymore. The general market is so immense, our little LDS-niche is hardly worth sneezing at - even for scrapbook companies I drive past along I-15, owned and operated by latter-day saints who once catered to their LDS customers.

Well, we all have birthdays and holidays and vacations and other memorable occasions we want to scrap like the general population - but what about those uniquely LDS aspects of our lives that we also want to make a permanent and beautiful record of?

That’s where LDV steps in. We have a growing array of LDS-themed scrapbook products, along with the traditional general/seasonal themes, and we can offer it because our products are digital! We leave the printing, if you even decide to print - to you! That allows us to design to our hearts’ content without worrying if we can sell 10,000 of any design. Printing and manufacturing prices go down with volume - so most companies have to pick and choose what products they will feature with that high-volume requirement.

Problem - not everyone knows how to use digital images to make beautiful scrapbooks! I do my designing with Adobe Photoshop - oh what cool things I can do with that robust program! But average Josephine scrapbook enthusiast isn’t going to pay the high ticket price for that high-end professional software, nor have the time to learn how to use it.

Well - I decided to test some affordable digital scrapbook software out. I wanted to see if it was easy to use, could do cool stuff, and if I could import images from our Village Download Depot collections into a scrapbook page using it. I read reviews about various products - and it was very hard to tell if they allow you to import images from outside their programs - so there was nothing to do but buy a package that sounded good and try it. I picked Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory Deluxe Version 3.0. It got the highest ratings in the reviews I read and only cost $29.95 direct from the manufacturer (you might find it cheaper elsewhere).

It arrived in a timely fashion and installed easily onto my computer. They have good documentation to step you through the process. It comes with tons of templates and clipart for unlimited designs, and has easy to use tools that do really nice things you would need scrapbook software to do. But the true test for me was, of course, could I use my own Village Download Depot images and Fonts to create scrapbook pages with it?

WAHOO! YES! It worked - and was so easy! With any project open in the editing window, click on the INSERT menu option and choose GRAPHIC then FROM FILE. You then find the image you want to insert from your DownloadDepot folders and viola! It is inserted and can be edited as needed! Now, granted, I am used to Photoshop - so the ease of use of this software seemed dreamy to me - but I really believe anyone could use this to create lovely digital scrapbook pages, import our great LDS scrapbook elements into it - edit them freely so they are just the right size, shape, direction etc - and print out beautiful pages, or simply save them in a form anyone can view them and email them to your family and friends.

As much as most people spend on their scrapbook supplies, this software is a small price to pay for a great tool.

Since most people have home printers that only print on 8.5×11″ - Scrapbook Factory templates are for that size paper - but they also allow you to select 12×12 layouts - and if you have a wide format printer, you can print those yourself, or send the files to a copy center that does wide format printing, or use an online service that will print your 12×12 pages and ship them to you. I am researching printers, scrapbook papers for inkjet printers and scrapbook printing services and will write about those more in a future post.

Debra