Are you still here? Please dont run away screaming – I am so excited to be doing my first challenge ever and on this wonderfully sweeeet bloggy thing and Id hate to lose my audience on an opening heading. Im just sort of kidding on the heritage front but I have used a wonderful photo of my Mum (aged 11). I discovered it last weekend when my sisters and I were sorting through her treasures. I was itching like mad to get it into a LO. Huge thanks to Robyn England (HappyRobyn) who gave me the itch a long time ago. Its been ages since I put a heritage photo on display so allow me to indulge just this once – pleeease??!?!

I digi-scrapped for quite a while before discovering blend modes. I’d seen them used on some amazing LOs but didn’t really start playing with them much until fairly recently. I remember seeing a LO called Beach Girl by Sharon Kenneally (one of the original babes) that was a scraplift of a LO by C.D. Muckosky. What struck me about this LO was the contrast of the large main photo and the smaller foreground photos – dont worry – you’ll get to see what I mean in a moment. Since then I have been playing with blend modes on everything – papers, titles, ribbons and of course photos – id probably try it on the kids too if I could just get them through the scanner. Even though some of the results are quite disasterous its super fun to see so many different effects created with one click. Soooo – my challenge to you for this Mix-It-Up Monday is to Mix It with blend modes.

As a backdrop for my special photos I used Sandra Boddington’s new kit Allure and one of the stick pins and a report card from Breezy. I have reduced the opacity of the large photo to provide the contrast I wanted against the smaller photos. I also used Holly McCaigs Purty Pic Actions to boost the contrast. The original photos are only around 4 x 2 inches so the quality was a little on the poor side when enlarged to this degree (they are nearly 60 years old, afterall). Oh one more thing – dont be afraid to use this technique on blurry photos (sharpen a little first of course!) – you can create some wonderful paint style effects. Oh and truly one more last thing – please leave a link to your Mix It Up “experiment” in the comments so we can all take a visit. Oh no – one final last thing (they;re supposed to come in threes right? If you need a tut on blendmodes I found one on Photoshop here at Effectica and another on PSP from this GraphicsSoft Page. OK – go have fun blending and mixing!