Well, hello! I am sure a lot of you are enjoying a day off today and I think I should preface this post by thanking all the individuals both past and present that have served our country, thank you kindly.

I posted this image on Instagram and had emails asking for a recipe. I cook a lot more than the average bear and my husband thinks I should be food blogging, but I admittedly don’t know how that would work since most things I make I don’t ever measure so I wouldn’t know how to translate that into a recipe. I also usually cook in a frenzy of hunger with a bit of vino thrown in, so again, I don’t know how that would translate. This dish however is pretty goof proof and the measurements can be fiddled with, you’d be hard pressed to come out with a bad result so I thought it might be time to try to share. The dish is roasted checca, which basically is a combo of chopped tomatoes, garlic and basil. In traditional checca those ingredients are uncooked but I always like mine sauteed with a little olive oil, but I digress. Checca is perfect topped on spaghetti, but you can also top it on toasted crostini for a most delicious appetizer, or if you want to it works perfect topped on fish or chicken breasts (and so much more). The ease and versatility of this dish makes it a summer standard in my book (when the tomatoes and basil are oh, so delicious).

//Ingredients//

One carton of organic cherry tomatoes (you can sub roma tomatoes about 6)

4 cloves of garlic (or more if you love your garlic)

Olive oil (use the good stuff, it’s so worth it)

Sea salt

(optional) Pepper

A handful of fresh basil leaves

//Prep//

Cut your tomatoes in quarters

slice or dice your garlic (I prefer a more rustic cut so I slice)

Cut your basil leaves in strips

Mix your tomatoes and garlic with 1 tbls to 2 tbls of olive oil

Heat oven to 350 F

On a baking sheet spread out your tomato, garlic and olive oil mixture

Sprinkle on your sea salt

(optional) add a couple of turns of black cracked pepper

Cook for about 15-20 minutes or until tender add the basil leaves last 5 minutes of cooking (make sure your garlic is not over browning/burning and that your tomatoes don’t get mushy!

That’s it! Your checca should be full of fragrance and flavor, your tomatoes soft but not mushy and infused with the garlic which should have taken on a nice toasted flavor, the basil will add a nice kick. Now go ahead and toss it with your pasta of choice, add it to your toasted crostini, your frozen pizza’s, scrambled eggs, gosh I could go on and on, but really I am just blabbering now. This dish is one of those, you know where you do hardly anything and your friends and family think you are some sort of culinary genius. Revel in it.

P.S. You still have one day to win our new Photoshop actions to digitize your lettering!  It is the easiest and quickest way to get your lettering from paper to pixel. You can enter here!

Michelle and I have been doing a ton of prep work for our soon to launch ‘Photoshop for Lettering Artists’ class, we have taught many on-line classes in the past but we have never filmed one (insert nail biting here). I of course the sleep deprived and harried mama who was supposed to be in charge of lettering supplies for props and demo for our trailer brought the wrong paper, I just grabbed a pad that I thought would be fine–well it wasn’t. We then proceeded to go through stacks of paper that Michelle had on hand and had a very serendipitous discovery!  Michelle handed me some smooth matte paper, it’s actually a fave or hers for printing photos and I went to work, what happened was nothing short of magic for me, the ink bloomed when it flowed from my nib and gave me a beautiful ‘brush’ effect. Why is this such a happy accident? Well, for those like myself that have tried unsuccessfully to work with a brush this gives you the control of the nib but the organic lines of a brush and it dries nice and matte which is perfect for scanning or shooting with your Iphone! We created a couple of Photoshop brushes for you so you can use them and see the texture of the lettering, it may not translate as well in the photo, but trust me you would be hard-pressed to be able to tell the difference.  So here’s to happy accidents!  Have fun experimenting and enjoy the free Photoshop brushes (I like to think of them as digital rubber stamps).

//RESOURCES//

Matte photo paper for project

Free XOXO Photoshop brush download

P.S. We cleaned up and created the Photoshop brush in 2 secs with our Vitamin L25| Photoshop actions set. You can still enter to win a free set here!

I usually don’t like a font with so much swirly, girly flourish but I think this one could lend itself to some great projects where a more juvenile hand is desired. Check out that ‘t’ in ‘gratitude’, whoa!  I am thinking invites for a little girl’s party, a blog post on anything girly; this font would be a fun player. It’s not a take yourself seriously font, we have many others in the lettering category that would be a better fit for a more sophisticated application but if you are looking for a fun script with a little exuberance I think this one might do very well!

//RESOURCES//

Font featured

Font house-Sudtipos (we have featured many of their fonts)

P.S. I LOVED our last giveaway question about what your favorite book or books are. I loved reading through everyone’s comments and feel like I know you all a little bit better. I hope we can pose another question in the near future that will elicit such wonderful responses! We have a winner and in a strange twist of fate it happens to be the person that originally posed the question to me. We use a random number generator to choose our winner’s and when ‘3’ popped up I went over to the comments and saw it was Carrie. So very strange, but I do thank her for the amazing question and congratulate her on her win, and thank you to everyone that participated!

Yesterday we had an awesome review on our new Foto Rx | Vitamin L25 Photoshop actions to help easily and efficiently digitize your lettering (or as we like to say go from paper to pixel). The review was by Jessica of Coco and Mingo, a lettering artist that we truly admire, which reminds me we need to get her interviewed for you! We sent Jessica a note to thank her and asked her if  she would like to giveaway a set (this is our first giveaway!) and lucky for us she said yes!  Just hop on over to Coco and Mingo and enter to win, while you are there make sure to take a peek around, it’s one of our favorite blogs. Good luck, visit and enter to win here!

The other day a friend of the blog and a self professed newbie to Photoshop had downloaded our aqua skies action and had a bit of trouble loading, we directed her to our videos we have which we hope are easy peasy. That Friday we gave away free flourish Photoshop brushes and she emailed an S.O.S. saying they weren’t working (we did a little troubleshooting and found out she was trying to use the steps for installing Photoshop actions for her Photoshop brushes). Michelle and I both know that Photoshop can seem like an incredibly daunting + intimidating program, but I promise you that it doesn’t have to be!

My unsolicited advice? Don’t try to learn everything in Photoshop all at once, you don’t need to know how to do everything if you are a newbie to Photoshop (or even an expert), you just need to learn what tools and tasks you need to complete your given project. Even though I am a .PsD (that’s basically like having a Ph.D in Photoshop) there are many tools I don’t know how to use, don’t use or don’t care to ever use (for me it’s some of the awful filters, the 3D capabilities and web design tools like slicing. What you don’t know about slicing? Exactly).

I thought I would tackle installing Photoshop brushes today with some of the easier tutorials. We use Photoshop brushes a lot around here and we have made many to download for free, so I hope this helps!

//How to install Photoshop brushes//

This is an older post, but I think it’s still a very simple + easy explanation.

A little more advanced but still easy to understand.

P.S. Michelle and I will be teaching a ‘Photoshop for Lettering Artist’ class in the very near future, if you want to learn the step-by-step on how to get your lettering from paper to pixel sign-up to be notified of class launch here!

P.P.S. I used brushes on this image I edited by Nicolai Bernsten. When you really have a handle on Photoshop brushes they will help you create magic within your images. I also wanted a good excuse to practice developing our B+W Photoshop actions, it’s going to be a lot of experimentation until we are ready for market, wish us luck!