On this page you will find my tutorials, our vacation for 2007 and anything else I decide to share. So check back often.

Awards

I'm a member of a graphics forum called thePlace and we have an Artist of the Month Contest each month.

I now have five awards in the Artist of the Month contest at thePlace.

March 07 - My awards were a complete surprise to me. I had been entering the Artist of the Month contest for about two years and had never won. I wasn't even going to enter the contest for the month of March '07'. Why? I wouldn't win anyway. But there weren't enough entries for March so Rollie asked me to make a couple of tags. I just threw together a couple of images and guess what? It won!! I was so shocked.

September 07 - The subject for the September contest was "Back to School". Well, I knew you had to have a school bus so I put some thought into my creation. I spent three days on the school bus tag. I had a lot of searching to do. I wanted some children in the tag since I was doing a school bus but I didn't want clipart children. They just aren't real enough. I found some great pictures of children, had to do a lot of cleaning up around them and then I added them to the image. Well, you can't just stop there. The bus needs to move. So I worked on making it move in to pick the children up and then on down the street toward school. There were a lot of great entries and I was really anxious and couldn't wait to see who won. I was really hoping as I put a lot of thought and work into this one but there were so many great entries that I wasn't sure I even had a chance. And it won!!

June 08 - Eight months have passed and there have been some great themes for Artist of the Month. The theme for June '08' was Home. I had to put my thinking cap on for this one. What in the world do you do for such a theme? As I was looking through my picture tubes trying to get some inspiration I saw my meeces and thought "ah ha!! A mouse house". Well, mice live behind the walls, right? So that's the way I took it. Again, there were a lot of great entries. My mouse house won for the month of June.

May 09 - We've had some fun challenges and some great Artist of the Month themes since last summer. The theme for May '09' was Spring. It was raining here as it so often does in Oregon in the spring. I wasn't feeling very well which didn't help with my creativity so I just threw some images together and called it "good enough". Well, my image of appleblossoms, birds and a birdhouse won for May. I was rather surprised and pleased, of course.

November 09 - The theme for November was earth, wind, fire, water. I put off doing this graphic as long as possible as I couldn't figure out how to use PSP filters for making the elements. I just started putting things together and trying different filters. I thought we were suppose to put all four of the elements together in one graphic so that's what I did. When I went to vote I saw the other entries were just one of the elements so I thought I messed up royally. But I guess not, my creativity and hard work won! Talk about being shocked. When I saw that I had won my mouth dropped open in total shock. I got the news on Thanksgiving day. What a wonderful Thanksgiving gift and the perfect ending to a wonderful day.

May 2011 - The theme for May was the number 6. I thought "Oh wonderful. What kind of graphic can you do with the number 6?" So I really had to put my thinking cap on. I was having a terrible time coming up with ideas so I just opened PSP and started playing with fonts. I made some flowers out of the "6", they turned out rather cute, I think. Then I found a paperclip font and did a Roman numeral VI. That looked rather plain and boring - now the ideas are hitting my head, LOL - so I added a note to the paperclip. I submitted my entry and had to just sit and wait for the deadline date then we could all vote. There were some really neat entries so I was pleasantly surprised when I checked to see who won that it was - "Me".

You can see my entries by clicking on the awards below to see the images I created.

       

       

     

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