Heritage Makers Reunion

I've just returned from the Heritage Makers annual convention held in Las Vegas, Nevada. WOW!! I'm re-energized and very excited about the new things happening at HM. They have hired new designers and I'm looking forward to some great new templates in the template gallery. In my humble opinion, things are starting to look really great at HM. This translates into nicer products and faster creation times for books. After all, when you start with a great template, putting a book together is fast AND simple.

HM is also introducing new products and incentives. In addition, a new website design will be up and running in October. I can't wait! This is a forward thinking company and a trend setter in the digital scrapbooking industry. I expect to see many great new ideas and products from them in the coming months and years.

Welcome to my Etsy shop!

I've opened a shop!
Copy and paste this link to your browser to see one of a kind, hand painted glassware and ceramics.

www.cikeenan.etsy.com

A Change in Artistic Direction

It's been awhile since I posted to my blog and I apologize. I'm shaking things up a little and exploring new territory. As many of you have already found out, I am helping others create artwork on ceramics and am developing my own line of hand painted glassware and ceramics. My work is for sale in the Tampa area at Cupcake! Cupcakes in Westchase.

This is a big new undertaking for me, and I appreciate your patience while I get everything up and going. Presently, I'm working on some custom designs for baby birth commemorative plates, wedding "sign in" platters, signature photo image plates and celebration plates. My glasswork is very free form and can be designed around your theme. The martini and margarita glasses are on display at Cupcake! Cupcakes and I hope to have photographs of everything posted here very soon.

I will continue my work as a Heritage Makers consultant and would love to continue my work designing custom photo albums. This new venture with glassware and ceramics is just another extension of my passion for art in all its forms.

Please contact me if you have any thoughts on themes and ideas for specialty glasses and plates. I'd love to create special holiday gifts for your loved ones.

Young Authors Contest

Heritage Makers is sponsoring a contest this summer and I want to help. If you know a teenager who would like to write a book about themselves, we are going to meet once a week throughout the summer. I'll show them how to design a book from start to finish. They can use their own photos, drawings and words to create a one of a kind book that shows the world from their own unique perspective. Classes will be about an hour in length and will cost just $5 - 10, depending on the number of participants. If you'd like more information about the contest, click on the link in the left hand column. E-mail me if you'd like more information about my classes. cikeenan@verizon.net.

My latest watercolor

The painting is actually a bit larger than this... I uploaded it using my scanner... I will take a proper photograph soon so that I can have prints made. This was inspired by a painting I saw in Anne Abbgott's Daring Color. This book re-ignited my passion for watercolor. I'm already starting on another!

You're Invited!

You've scanned your photos... Now What???

Last week, I spent some time with my new scanner and I was pretty amazed. I managed to scan over 1500 photos in a little over 2 hours. The scanner is lightning fast and so efficient.

Now that these photos are digitized, I have some great software that makes my life so much easier. It's called Shoebox and it's made exclusively for the Mac. But if you're PC user, don't stop reading! I understand that the product called ACDSee works very similarly.

My process is simple. I insert my disc with my photos on it into my computer drive. I then open Shoebox. Within Shoebox, I can see all my photos on the disc. Then, I just start tagging them. The way I scan my photos is by years. So for instance, I can open the folder on my disc titled "1995." From there I will see all the photos from that year. (I could have scanned by category or topic, but I choose to scan mainly by year.) Within that year, I start assigning tags. So, on one photo, I can tag it with as many categories as I choose. For an example, Let's take a photo from Brianna's birth.

I tagged this photo with "1995," "Brianna," "Nick," and "4th of July."

Now, I don't need to know where this photo is on my computer anymore. I can just go into Shoebox and type in one of my tagged categories. If I type, "4th of July," every photo I've ever taken on the 4th of July will appear. Ditto if I type in "Brianna," or "Nick," or so on. I hope you get my gist.

And while this is nice for my more recent photos, it's fantastic for the older ones. For example, my 25 year old niece is getting married next year. Most likely, we will do a video montage for her and her fiance. With Shoebox, it's quite easy. I can just type in "Theresa" and every picture that I own of Theresa appears on my screen. It also tells me where it's stored. What's even better, is that if the montage is to include every family member, I can type in all their names and I can find the photos of Theresa with anyone she's ever known! It's great fun to see what you've got on file... and never has it been faster to find photos! I just found this photo of Theresa and her great grandmother and posted it here within 2 minutes...


Before I scanned these photos, I couldn't have told you where this photo was. Either in an actual shoebox, a photo album I haven't opened in years, or a tupperware bin filled to the top with photos that my mother gave me. It might have taken me hours to find it... if I could even have found it at all.

Shoebox is great for all my photo needs. For scrapbooking, it's unbelievable. The same way I tag my photos, I tag my digital art supplies. So if I'm working on a layout, I can type in "swirl" or "frame" or whatever, and all my elements are right there for me to see. Invaluable!

I hope this posting helps and if you have further questions or I can help you in any way, please feel free to give me a call.