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Do You Dock Or Float Your Windows?
We’re back with another Pixelady vs. Pixelady* post on Photoshop Elements. Today we’ll answer the burning question of whether or not to float your windows. Well, Here’s the quick answer: whichever way works for you! However, there’s one caveat, if you want to change your workspace color. Scroll to the bottom of this post to…
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Pixelady Vs. Pixelady: Fill Layer With Pattern
In this installment of Pixelady vs. Pixelady, we are going to show you how to fill a layer (or selection) with a pattern. Deb’s Way Yes, this is one of those old-dog ways. In fact, it was the only way to fill a layer (or selection) with a pattern when Deb started with Photoshop. You…
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Different Ways To Copy And Paste Selections
We’re going to go over some different ways to copy and paste in our first installment of Pixelady vs. Pixelady. Kris’s Way One way to copy and paste a part of an image in Photoshop Elements (it works for regular Photoshop, too) is to make a selection. Use the Rectangular Marquee tool to create a…
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Pixelady vs. Pixelady: Different Ways To Do The Same Thing in Photoshop
Greetings everyone. It’s Deb here with a little teaser for our upcoming, intermittent series of blog posts called Pixelady vs. Pixelady. Just because we work together doesn’t mean we always do things the same way. Photoshop is a great case in point because there are so many ways to accomplish the same task. Of course,…
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Coils, Spirals, And The Twirl Filter In Photoshop
A couple of months ago, Kris blogged about some of her favorite Photoshop filters that were not listed in the Filter Gallery. I’m back to share another one: The Twirl Filter. This filter might not be as exciting to some of you, but I’m a twirl kind of gal. Yes, I loved twirling skirts when…
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Anni Albers: Small Works, Big Inspiration
This is Kris with a post that’s been in my head for months. The Bauhaus is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, so it sure was nice to find an exhibit on Anni Albers at the SFMOMA this past June. It was the tiniest of exhibits, all small works, in a little room off to…
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Linking vs. Grouping Layers in Photoshop Elements
This is Kris with a Tech Tuesday post that will answer the age-old question of whether we should link or group layers in Photoshop Elements. Well, it’s not that old of a question because grouping layers is a relatively new feature in Photoshop Elements, but our students often ask us why we would pick one…
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Deb’s 2019 SAQA Dream Collection
This is Deb, back with my SAQA Benefit Auction post. Kris picked eight grid-inspired pieces last week. I decided to try something a little different. I have several auction pieces I’ve purchased over the years, and there’s no rhyme or reason to them. What if this year I picked eight pieces that I could add…
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Kris’ 2019 SAQA Dream Collection
I generally don’t like the end of summer, but one thing that helps ease my pain is looking forward to the annual SAQA Benefit Auction, which begins Sep 13 this year. SAQA invites everyone to create their dream collection, the eight pieces we would “take” home with us in a perfect world. Deb and I…
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Try These Photoshop Elements Fixes When Your Tools Go Rogue
This is Kris, back with another Tech Tuesday installment. There will be times, trust me on this one, when your Photoshop Elements tools will just start behaving badly. It’s really not your fault. Well, actually you probably clicked something you shouldn’t have, but that’s not the point. The question is how to fix it. Here…
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“Everything”: The Windows Search Tool That Really Works
EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it! “Everything” is a tip is too good to wait for Tech Tuesday, so here is Deb with a special Friday edition of Tech Tuesday. Are you as frustrated with using the Windows search function as I am? You know there’s a file somewhere in your computer, but $%&$#-ing Windows…
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Peruse, Palette, Ponder: Creating An Artist’s Palette
This is Deb, pondering a lot lately. I sometimes start my day scanning social media, not a bad thing, especially when it revolves around one’s own artistic palette. My recent perusing evolved into a theme. First I opened my Adobe Create magazine and read an article about illustrator Sarah Hasenmaile. Inspiration Susan limits herself to…
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Printing on Fabric Update: Spoonflower
Black 5 years ago we wrote a post about fabric printing services. Here’s an excerpt: Let’s face it, we would send our file in a handwritten letter to the company and have it delivered by Pony Express if they could print a decent black. Black makes all other colors pop, so if the company doesn’t…
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Our e-Book And the Dangers of Free Downloads
“All we are is data in the wind.” These are the words David Fear uses in his Rolling Stone review of the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. Companies use the data they retrieve from our Internet searches, games, and, yes, free downloads to gain valuable information they use for a variety of purposes. We…
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Deb Makes A “Selfie” for Cloth in Common
It has been a hectic summer! Since Kris is working part-time at another job, I thought I might need another activity to keep me busy. Yeah, right. After hemming and hawing, I decided to join Cloth in Common, an international group of twelve talented fiber artists organized by Karol Kusmaul from Florida. Cloth in Common Every…
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Making Straight Lines Of Squares And Dots In Photoshop Elements
This is Kris with another one of those Tech-Tuesday-Slap-My-Head-Stories. When I was making some graphics for our first online classes, I wanted to make a straight line of squares (we like using squares because they’re pixels!). “This should be easy,” I thought. Well, at some point Deb looked at my file and taught me that…
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Some Quirks of Photoshop Elements And How To Conquer Them
You know how it is. You’re working in Photoshop Elements (PSE), and suddenly things just aren’t working the way you were taught. That’s probably because PSE can be quirky, and if it would just be upfront and tell us everything we need to know about it, er, the Pixeladies would be out of a job!…
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Graduation, Procrastination, And Quilting Indiana Jones
2010 It’s Deb, back again with a confession. Nine years ago I took some photographs of my favorite Indiana Jones in his suburban backyard. I just loved his style and attitude. As soon as I saw the image in the lower right, I knew it had to become a quilt. Of course I had to…
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Go Out Of Bounds With Photoshop Elements Guided Edits
This is Deb, back with another Tech Tuesday episode. In addition to Expert and Quick modes, Photoshop Elements (PSE) has a guided mode. It will walk you through, step by step, creating some fun special effects with your photos. If you open the Editor in PSE 2019 and click on the Guided tab just below…
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Group Layers In Photoshop Elements And Save your Sanity!
When we first started teaching Photoshop Elements, we hated the fact that you could not group layers like you could in plain ol’ regular Photoshop. Sometime along the way, Adobe realized how critical this feature was and added it to Photoshop Elements. We thought it would be a good idea to remind our former students…
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Field Trip to the Asian Art Museum & Kids’ Art
Kris and I love to take field trips to museums. Last month we took the long way to San Jose (via San Francisco) so we could visit the “Kimono Refashioned“ exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. We hit the jackpot, though, when we ran into a kids’ art exhibit at the same museum. Kimono Refashioned…
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Pixeladies, Photoshop Elements, And Camtasia
Kris and I are busy updating our Photoshop Elements (PSE) Essentials classes. We’ve upgraded to Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019, and my job was to create all new videos. If you’ve ever wanted to try video editing or capturing what’s on your monitor, Camtasia 2019 from Techsmith is the best thing since sliced bread. And I…
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Writing An Artist Statement
When we were recently asked about our artist statement, we made the ugly realization that it had been a while since we had written one. Even when we updated our website last fall, we didn’t pay attention to our artist statement and just cut and pasted the (outdated) information to the new website. That sure…
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San Jose: Another Upcoming Pixeladies Adventure
Off to San Jose We’re about to head off on another Pixeladies adventure to the 2019 Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) Conference. Kris and I will be starting our second decade of attending SAQA conferences. Our first one was in Athens, Ohio in 2009. We had just become Regional Representatives for the Northern California/Nevada…
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Grab A Friend, Pick Your Favorite Quilt, And Review Your Creative Process
We were recently asked by the German publication, Patchwork Professional Magazin, to tell them which one of our quilts was our favorite and why. You’d think that would be a pretty easy exercise, but since there are two of us, we had to have a discussion. It turned out to be a fascinating exercise about our…
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GYST – Creating An Artwork Inventory
In a previous Tech Tuesday blog, we wrote about GYST (Getting Your Sh*t Together), the software program we use to track our artwork. Well, we had quite the response to that post, with people asking all sorts of great questions, so we thought we would follow up with a few more features of GYST. Today…
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Katharine McCormick: Finishing Touches
We’re done! It seems like we have been working on our Katharine McCormick project forever, but it’s been closer to nine months. Today we thought we’d tell you about some of the finishing touches. There are links at the bottom of the page to all of the posts about our KDM project. Boo-boos It’s not…
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Katharine McCormick: Reading T.C. Boyle’s “Riven Rock”
This is Kris, taking on one of the last blog installments about our Katharine McCormick project. When we started our research, we learned that T.C. Boyle had written a novel, Riven Rock (1998), based on Katharine’s marriage to Stanley McCormick. We resisted reading the novel until we finished the quilt because we didn’t want it to influence our…
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Adobe Create Magazine And The Scribble Artist Action Set
It’s Deb here for another Tech Tuesday offering. Like many of you, I’m suffering through my annual cold. I don’t feel up to doing the things I should be doing like pruning my roses or working on projects that are due. Often I use the time to catch up on some reading. I love my…
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Katharine McCormick: The Boa
It’s Deb again, back with more about our project for the exhibition Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. One of the reasons I love the particular photo of Katharine McCormick we used is because she’s wearing a boa. In my personal statements, I always end with this: “I’m waiting for feather boas…