My Paint Shop Pro Addiction

For those of you who might want to know what I do with my "spare" time... I am a Paint Shop Pro Addict. I have been using it for about 5 years. I believe it all started when I downloaded Incredimail. Incredimail is a really fun email program that can act just like Outlook Express but you can personalize it with animation, sounds and music and backgrounds. And the best thing about Incredimail for me was there was an accompanying program which allowed you to make your own email stationary. I was a fanatic at that.

I bought Paint Shop Pro when I wanted to really start designing advanced stationary. I joined some PSP groups on Yahoo to learn and took some online classes. At one point I had my own Yahoo group for people who wanted my stationary. When I made one I would send it out to all the people in the group. I had a couple hundred people in the group. But life distracted me and Incredimail, which was a bit buggie sometimes on my computer, made me tired. So I turned my attention to web design.

I could still use my knowledge of Paint Shop Pro while I learned HTML coding and CSS. I took a number of online courses through LVS Online. This is a wonderful site for virtual learning. Visit this link for their course offerings. If you are looking for some distraction or a way of feeling like maybe all your brain cells have not evaporated... this might be the place for you.

Katrina is very much a part of our present even though she is two years in the past. One of the ways Katrina hit me the hardest was the loss of all my scrapbook pages of the kids, my photos and all my supplies. Everything I had scrapbooked prior to Katrina was with tangible materials. I was so depressed knowing I could never replace and remake those pages. And scared to try for fear of losing it all again. So I turned to digital scrapbooking. You can see some links on the left of web sites that pertain to digital scrapbooking.

I use Paint Shop Pro to create my scrapbook pages now. I bought an external drive where I store all my pages and my digital kits. I have papers, frames, alphabets, elements of all sorts, word art and much more. If, by chance, anotne comes our way all I will need to do is grab my external drive and my PSP disk. Then if the computer is lost I still have my software program and I can install it. in a new computer. haha! I am a thinker. To make a scrapbook page, all I have to do is visit my folder of digital photos that I download from my camera and choose the pictures I want to scrap. I then go through my scrapbook materials and choose the paper and elements I want to use for the page. There are so many wonderful designers out there creating scrapbook kits and elements that it makes your head spin. Last thing to do is open Paint Shop Pro and have some fun. The scrapbook page above was done in Paint Shop Pro. That is Avery at Busch Gardens. We visited there last year.

Oh, and if you are wondering why I am typing on the blog instead of PSPing... well I just upgraded to PSPX for PSP9 and its a little disconcerting. Its nice to go to the upgrade but there is a bit of a learning curve. They have made changes to the software application and it takes a while to get use to them. The frustration factor just got to be too much and I shut it. So there... take that PSPX. I will tackle it tomorrow when I am rested.