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Katharine McCormick: Creating A Cartoon
As promised, we’re back with more about our project for the exhibition Deeds Not Words: The Power of Persistence, Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage, which premieres in 2020. If you would like to read our first post on Katharine Dexter McCormick, click here. We usually start on our portrait projects by looking for a…
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Tech Tuesday: Photoshop Elements Organizer Advanced Search
One of the best parts about using Photoshop Elements Organizer is being able to find a particular photo without knowing a) the file name or b) where it is on your computer, DVD, external hard drive, etc. One of the menu items in Organizer is “Find.” Using that option, you can search for files based…
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Transparency In Fashion: Art That Makes You Think
Do you let your magazines pile up? You know–you have a whole stack that you haven’t read and then try to read them all at once when you want to clean your house. I usually do that. But yesterday I received my Surface Design Journal and while flipping through the pages, there seemed to be…
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Tech Tuesday: Adjusting Color For Fabric Printing
When we teach our online Photoshop Elements classes, we usually end the class with a video on fabric printing. In our minds, the hardest thing to do in the creative process of getting image to fabric is the COLOR. How do you replicate . . . or even come close . . . to seeing…
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Tech Tuesday: Watermarking your Images
Hey! We’re back with a special edition of Tech Tuesday . . . on Thursday. Many people have asked us to create a little primer on watermarking the images you want to post on the Internet. Here’s how to do it with Adobe Photoshop Elements. We’re using version 2018 in this example, but this process…
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Tech Tuesday: Work-around for “Category” Glitch in Adobe Organizer
Don’t get me wrong, we here at Pixeladies absolutely love Adobe’s Organizer software, which so quickly and smartly helps you organize your digital images. It’s included in Photoshop Elements, so you really get two programs for the price of one. What’s nice about Organizer is that you have the flexibility to change how you organize…
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Tech Tuesday: Group Layers in Photoshop Elements
There are lots of little differences between the professional Photoshop Creative Cloud and the consumer Photoshop Elements that we have always missed when teaching Photoshop Elements. For sure, Photoshop Elements is really all most of us need to do what we want to do, but yet . . . . One thing that we always…
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Tech Tuesday (continued): Duplicate Photo Cleaner
I’m back with a few more tips for finding duplicate photos on your computer. Click here to read the first part of my post on using Duplicate Photo Cleaner, that nifty program that will let you find exact duplicates or photos that are similar to each other. Similarity Settings Remember that Similarity setting from our…
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Tech Tuesday: Duplicate Photo Cleaner
We’re going to start our online Photoshop Elements Organizer class soon, so I thought it would be a good time to review another program* that will find duplicate image files. The Problem Let’s say you downloaded all the photos from your phone, didn’t delete them from your phone, and downloaded them all again a…
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Katharine McCormick: Making Her Mark Part 1
It’s funny how the creative process works. Multiply that by 2, and you get an idea of what it’s like for us to come up with an idea and see it to fruition. That second part can sometimes take years. We’re finally working on a piece that has been on our collective back burner for…
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Photographs for Designing
I just returned from a fantastic SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) conference in San Antonio, Texas. Along with listening to lots of thought-provoking talks, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones, I took lots of photographs. Some of these photos might look odd to you, but for me they’re textures that I might…
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Creative Block? [Part 2]
Last week I wrote about creating a quilt by copying one of my favorite artists, Maria Shell. Here’s a link to that entry in case you missed it. The first thing I learned by copying Maria Shell is that she is a master of color. Her quilts may look simple and random, and the construction might…
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Creative Block?
Sometimes you just need a change of scenery. Kris and I usually take some time off at the end of the year. For me, time off doesn’t mean stop doing. I woke up one day and wanted to DO something–create something–something different. As an artist, when you have a style, it’s a good thing. But…
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MSU Museum Purchases “Drawing Humanity”
What a lovely surprise it was to hear that the Michigan State University Museum wanted to buy our “Language of Color 10: Drawing Humanity.” We said, yes, of course. The museum knows our quilt well because the museum, along with the Women of Color Quilters Network and the Desmond & Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, mounted…
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Open Closed Eyes In Photoshop Elements 2018
Try to open someone’s eyes in Photoshop Elements. This new added feature can work like a charm. It can save a group photo.
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Tech Tuesday: Inspiration, Spoonflower and Photoshop
This started out to be a post on working with multiple images in Photoshop, but it has turned into a post about inspiration and why I allow my inbox to be filled with promotions for this product or that service. Most of you know that I’m a saver. Kris thinks I’m a boarderline hoarder, but…
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And What did you do on your Summer Vacation? Part II
For the first time ever, the Pixeladies took the summer off. If you want to know what a productive summer was like, you’ll have to read Deb’s post. My main goal was to find a part-time job to help pay for our new 2017 fully ELECTRIC Chevy Bolt! I am totally in love with this car!…
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And What did you do on your Summer Vacation?
For the first time ever, the Pixeladies took the summer off. Deb needed to find herself, and Kris, well you’ll have to wait until next week for that. I, Deb, really needed to find my paint rollers and paint the interior walls of my house. I had also planned a slight renovation of the kitchen,…
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Cover Girls, Exhibition, And Vacation, Oh My!
We certainly are starting our vacation off with a bang. For one, we were interviewed for the latest Patchwork Professional magazine, which just hit the newsstands. Patchwork Professional is published in Germany, so we had double the fun answering our interview questions in German. Yes, the editor was a bit surprised at that! The best…
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Art And Politics: What Does An American Look Like?
I won’t mince words. Last November’s election for US president hit Deb and me like a punch in the gut. In fact, we’re still reeling from what seems like a daily assault on what we have always held as true; we have the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We’ve never shied…
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Digital Designing Is Finally Here!
Several years ago we taught an “intermediate” online Photoshop Elements course. We enjoyed teaching it very much, but we knew that what we really wanted to do was to get our students to the point where they could unleash their creativity through Photoshop. Ever since we revamped our PSE 1 & 2 classes, our students…
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What We Found at the Met
Yesterday I told you about the Met joining forces with Creative Commons. Click here to read the post. Today I’ll show you some of the goodies I found. By now you know Kris and I both love text. We don’t even have to know what it means to like it. My favorites (this week) are…
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Tech Tuesday: The Met Goes Public–Domain, That Is
There are real advantages to collaborating. Here’s one I hadn’t thought of. Kris and I don’t read the same articles, websites, and blogs. So when one of us sees something exciting, we share it with the other. Kris stumbled across a good one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) has partnered with Creative Commons…
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Classes At The Schweinfurth
There are so many quilting classes out there that it’s sometimes difficult to sort through them all to find one that is most suited to your needs and desires. We recently came upon the summer class schedule for the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY (near Syracuse). If you’re looking for serious artist teachers, you need look…
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Pixeladies Class Contest: We Have A Winner!
Last week we held a contest to give away a Pixeladies online class. We asked our readers to leave a comment on our blog post about inspiration and documentation. Well, today we randomly drew* a winner: Kit Vincent! Kit wins a Pixeladies online class. Now, Kit can enroll in any Pixeladies class she wants to,…
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Tech Tuesday: Fabric Printing, Part 3
We are often asked to recommend a good online fabric-printing service. A few years ago we wrote a couple of reviews. You can read them here: Online Fabric-Printing Service Review 1 Online Fabric-Printing Service Review 2 This past summer we had the opportunity to write a more comprehensive article about online fabric-printing services for the SAQA* Journal.…
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Inspiration and Documentation
Kris and I are revamping our Digital Designing class. Sometimes it takes us quite a while to formulate a class, but this one came together in an afternoon. I just love it when that happens. So while Kris was fleshing out the outline, I was looking for inspiration for projects. I’d really love to have…
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Tech Tuesday: Duplicate File Finder
As promised in yesterday’s blog post, I’m going to show you why I’m in love with Duplicate File Finder by Ashisoft.com. You might notice that I have the Pro Edition. The free version looks the same; some of the features are just deactivated. More on that later. Sorry Mac peeps, this is a PC-only program. Once…
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Tech Tuesday Preview: Duplicate File Finder
Well, it’s not Tuesday yet, but I just thought I would begin today because you can’t get started on this stuff soon enough! If you are paranoid, like we are, you’ll save your files in different places. For example, we might have Project1.psd on my computer, Kris’ computer, and our Google drive. We tell each other,…
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Ahh, The Company We Keep!
I regularly check out the website of Studio Art Quilt Associates because they frequently change their homepage banners. For me, it’s a weekly art fix. Well, wasn’t I surprised to check in the other day to find this amazing collage: Wow, our Obama quilt is in great company! These artists have produced some amazing work, and we hope you…