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!

It seems each week has it’s own set of crazy obstacles that leave me breathless, this week proved to be no different. Michelle and I are in full-on prep mode to get ready for our ‘Photoshop for Lettering Artists’ class launch (the launch date has been pushed back to June). The more I think about it the more nervous I get and the more I wonder why we decided it was a such a good idea in the first place. I know it’s a good idea (because I get about a 100 emails on this subject a day), but I wish my clone (if I had one) would do the class for me, being on camera is terrifying!

Our friend Sanae launched her first children’s book- Little Kunoichi last Sunday, and she is prepping for book number 2 now which is a sewing/memoir hybrid (she is a creative Jedi). We will be interviewing Sanae extensively soon because I think you will be happily surprised to find out how this blogger got her book deals!

Ever since I read about The Cure beauty product I can’t get it out of my head, I must try this stat! If you have already, please let me know what you thought, from the Amazon reviews this product is a miracle worker!

Because I can’t seem to focus on just one thing (even though I truly do try), I have been tinkering with our future Photoshop action sets (and a little Lightroom play as well). We know we want to do a B+W set, and one to do with light (hmm? cryptic enough), but we have also been toying with the idea of a mini matte set, the look is so popular right now and we think it’s subtle enough that you won’t look back on your edits a few years from now and cringe (that’s how I feel about some of my early photo editing, yikes!) Hint, this photo was originally destined for the trash bin, it was too cool, too dark and altogether trash worthy but with a little light therapy and matte Foto Rx actions I think it really recreates the feel of early morning summer light. Do you like the matte look? Or do you think you would be more interested in achieving beautiful light in your images?

Have a favorite book and love a good font? Don’t forget to enter to win Laura Worthington’s hefty new font collection here.

P.S. Want that beautiful glowy light today?  Michelle has the most awesome (and easy) tutorial here.

We’ve teamed up with Laura Worthington today for a  giveaway of her new font Adorn Smooth! If you are not familiar with Laura’s work you will be floored at what is included in her font families. In the Adorn Smooth Collection she really took care of everything you would need font wise to create the perfect invite: A beautiful script font (but of course), a slab serif–a great alternative to those who had sticker shock at the Archer font I mentioned the other day. A simple serif, a deco inspired sans serif (shown above), an elegant engraved, ornaments, banners, flourishes, oh my!  The set even comes with a 71 page resource on how to use everything, sample images to inspire your own creations and easy to reference specimen charts. Laura does not play around, these are seriously pro fonts.

As with Adorn, Adorn Smooth provides a disparate but harmonious typographic toolkit for creating wedding invitations, event posters, book jackets, or packaging.

To enter to win, (I hope this is easy, you know how my not so easy giveaway went last time–insert Debbie Downer music here). I was recently asked what my favorite book was and I was flummoxed, I love so many, it’s so hard to pick just one, right? So I of course gave her 3 favorite books (but that list could have easily been 300!) To enter to win just answer the same question:

What is your favorite book? Or books?

You don’t have to let us know why you chose the book(s), but if you want to share we’d love to know. We’ll choose the winner randomly next Wednesday, May 20, 2015. Good luck!

Our friend Jessica at Coco and Mingo recently announced she was one of the finalists for the Saveur blogger awards, it ‘s no surprise she was chosen out of 50,000 submissions! Jessica’s blog is always meticulously edited, beautifully designed and visually enticing. Jessica also happens to be incredibly kind, maybe it’s the Hawaiian roots, but you can always count on Jessica to be authentically involved with her readers and on her social media platforms. What do I mean by that? I mean she’s genuinely excited to hear from you and it shows, she takes time to answer comments and interact, it such a beautiful example of building a successful blog + community.

When visiting the Saveur site to cast my votes (unfortunately voting is now closed) I came upon some pretty noteworthy blogs that are filled with some serious inspiration if not serious good eats! I have links to everything below, I’ll make this post short because you are going to want to spend some time exploring over there. We hope you enjoy!

//RESOURCES//

Coco and Mingo

Saveur Blogger Awards

photo by jessica keala

Pinterest is great for design inspiration but sometimes you need more details especially when it comes to the fonts a designer chose. Thank goodness for the interwebs and its endless supply of good will–sharing is caring after all. ‘Fonts in use’ is a collaborative project where design is shared and the fonts used in the designs are disclosed, I am a little obsessed, I hope you will be too. They have an extensive archive of inspiration and everything is brilliantly categorized so it should be a breeze to locate a font for your next project.  It’s an excellent resource for any typophile, designer, font hoarder and the like. You can find the slab serif font used in the poster (it was originally created for Martha Stewart’s Living) and the hand-lettered font links below.

//RESOURCES//

Fonts in use

Slab serif font

Hand-lettered font