Mary Did You Know?

This is one of my most favorite songs of the season. I made this graphic in Paint Shop Pro using the art of Yvonne Gilbert. I have added both the lyrics to the song and a YouTube video that i found. There are a great number of YouTube videos that feature this song. Some are of entertainers singing... this one is actually put together with scene from the life of Jesus. There was another that featured scenes from The Passion, which was very hard to watch. This is a bit more uplifting. If you have never heard this song before I hope it touches you as it has touches me. I never fail to cry when listening to these lyric.

"Mary Did You Know"

[Originally written by Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene]

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would one day walk on water?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has come to make you new?
This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will give sight to a blind man?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will calm the storm with His hand?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy has walked where angels trod?
When you kiss your little Baby you kissed the face of God?

Mary did you know.. Ooo Ooo Ooo

The blind will see.
The deaf will hear.
The dead will live again.
The lame will leap.
The dumb will speak
The praises of The Lamb.

Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy is Lord of all creation?
Mary, did you know
that your Baby Boy will one day rule the nations?
Did you know
that your Baby Boy is heaven's perfect Lamb?
The sleeping Child you're holding is the Great, I Am.

New Blog Header

Did some work on this blog header last night. I changed the font to Cocktail. Looks like this font has had one too many. The design is basically the same but the image is crisper. I used masks for the background images of butterflies, plants and such. Of course I used Paint Shop Pro. I just upgraded the software to PSPX2. (That is a new fangled way of representing 12 I guess.) I am always a bit behind the curve. There is already a PSPXI out there.

For those who are interest in learning PSP and are what we call a newb or newbie. I recommend a Yahoo group called Stepping Stones Through PSP. It has 5 steps and each step has 25 lessons. So you will be a pro by the end. The lessons are small and manageable. Here is the link to Stepping Stones. Have fun!

Misunderstood

I am so excited! This is my first original tag. I was inspired by the mask which is in the purple and black frame. The tube of the woman is not something I would normally have chosen to use but it went perfectly with the black and purple frame. We will just pretend she is in a swimsuit. I am not sure where Misunderstood came from. The title, as the whole design, came from within the process. I tried to keep track of the steps it took to make it but I am really not 100% sure I can reproduce it. So I will take pride in this.

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.