Meet the Creative Team: Kayla Lamoreaux

Today, we're introducing the first of our five Creative Team members for 2008: Kayla Lamoreaux. Kayla's work, both in paper and digital formats, has been featured in magazines for years. She's a mom of five kids: a daughter, two sons and twin little girls. Luckily, she's married to "a wonderful and patient man who helps out with dinner," giving her time to work on her creative projects.

How long have you been scrapbooking digitally?
That depends on your definition of "digitally!" I'd been using my computer as a scrapbooking tool for a long time. Then, in 2002, I took a Photoshop class and was soon creating 100%-digital layouts.

How did you get into digital?
In late 2001 I was working on a scrapbook about my husband’s late father. I put it together in traditional format – all 63 pages! For Christmas we created 13 copies of the book – one for each of my husband’s immediate family and his aunts, uncles and grandparents. I scanned each individual page into my computer and printed them with my inkjet printer. 819 pages later (I think it took me a week to get done), I was convinced there must be a better way…which led me to taking my first Photoshop class.

What's something most people don't know about you?
I am a nationally certified Parent to Parent trainer for CHADD. I teach other parents about ADHD and really enjoy making a difference in my community.

Do you have a tip you'd like to share with Digital Scrapbooking's readers?

For this layout, I wanted to show different steps of the action on a single page. I lined up the four successive photos and then merged the layers together over a transparent background. I then duplicated the new merged image by selecting Image > Duplicate and then converted the duplicated image to black and white.

While holding the Shift key, I dragged the black and white image back to the original photo (so the pixels lined up perfectly). I then added a layer mask to the black and white photo layer, and with my brush tool and foreground color set to black, I painted everything back in color except the bright blue slide top that would have distracted from my layout.

Look for Kayla's work in upcoming issues of Digital Scrapbooking!