best Photoshop/Elements mixed media tutorials ever

Tangie Baxter is a mixed media artist, both digital and paper. I've been a fan for several years, going to her studio in AZ last fall for a workshop that was a blast, taking online classes, buying digital goodies from her. A couple years ago I anted up for her full digital workshop and am sooo glad I did. I'd been using Photoshop and Elements for a few years and was doing ok on my own but would get terribly frustrated trying to figure out how to do cool mixed media effects by looking in books meant for photographers or other types of users.

I started at the first lesson and by the end of it had taken so many notes that I'd filled the class PDF I'd printed out and had to get more paper. I kept going, "So THAT'S how you do that!" It's really a great bunch of tutorials.

AND... they're now down to $75 for all 3 - Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. You get 35+ videos, PDFs, elements to use in the demos, a $25 coupon to Tangie's studio etc, etc.

$75 is half price. I'm posting a plug for the class cause I know from experience that it's a great deal on excellent classes. Every digital collage I've posted in the last couple years was made using what I learned in these classes.

If you've had a hankering to learn from scratch, or get better at, Photoshop or Elements, go take a look at this great deal.

Green Paper March Challenge

This month's Green Paper challenge was these three images.

As always, you had to use at least part of all three in some sort of art. I went digital this time, and if any seasoned Photoshop people are reading this, please don't laugh cause my border is pretty hack.

Took me quite a while to figure out something to do with these three totally unrelated images. Which, of course, is why it's called a Challenge!

I cropped the French holy card so that I could use its 2-sided border to make a complete frame for the ice skating lady. Took me a fair amount of fiddling, and it's far from perfect, but my mad Photoshop skilz aren't stout enough yet to seamlessly pull off something like this.

But... it's not glaringly awful and the overall look is what I was going for.

I filtered the b/w lady to sepia so that she'd relate better to the colorful border. I matted the bank letterhead on a black rectangle to separate it from the pale background. Played around with advertising slogans for a while and ended up with what you see.

pear with spoon

Well... just got done playing around with my camera and then photoshop, and I have an image I'm very happy with.

I took several pictures of a pear with some lace and an old spoon, then chose one and began to play with textures and layers. This is the original photo. Not bad but not very interesting.

Twenty minutes and lots of 'undo's later, I have this. Much more interesting.