Proud Mom, here! Check this out !!

Posted on May 17, 2012 by orples

You guys need to check out my son and his fiancee’s web business! Those two make me so proud! The young man speaking on the video is my youngest child, Brice. And YES! I am extremely proud of them both. The young lady in the photo (follow link) is my soon to be daughter-in-law … they are set to tie the knot in July. Anyway, I just had to share this. You know how us proud Mom’s love to brag!

QTOFFICE is an inventory management service for Mary Kaye Cosmetic’s salespersons. The kids started this business about 7 years ago and have been working side jobs while designing the platform behind their business and waiting for it to take off … it’s called burning the candle at both ends, I think. It appears, they’re really picking up speed … hopefully, one day soon, this will be the only business they will have to focus on. I suspect, though, they’ll continue to branch out. Brice and Jamie are both bubbling over with ambition. That is the first ingredient in any successful venture.

By the way, I wanted to mention the fact that this has been an extremely busy week and I will be away this upcoming weekend, so if I’ve not visited your blog as often as usual, please forgive me, for the time being. I hope to circle back on each of you. I do enjoy your contributions, as I hope you do mine, to the blogging environment. Blessings to all! 🙂 Marcy

Sunday Photo Challenge . Design

Posted on March 10, 2012 by orples

This was a brochure I made up for one of my plan designs when I was focusing on my drafting business. I really need to update my ‘Plans by Marcy’ website. With the ‘new’ housing market being so slow, I’ve been busy with my books and haven’t put the time into tweaking my information and/or adding new plans to my portfolio. Unlike most of my piers, I think color should be used in plans. I not only use color in my brochures, but draw the actual plans in color too. Unfortunately, when I post my drawings on my website, I have to turn them into JPEG files, which distorts the original colors used in my AutoCadd program.

The sample below was printed on 8-1/2″ x 11″ card stock. At one point I was making quite a few similar fliers to hand out and post locally. It seems though, when I’m drafting these days, I am either doing custom jobs, room additions, or renovations. Business in the housing market is sad at the moment, thus my focus has been on my books instead.

A brochure I'd made up for a Craigslist Advertizement.

Below is a sample page from one of my plans. I draw them in color and when printed, they come out much nicer than they look on the computer screen. Being shown on 24″ x 36″ paper helps bring out the details much better than you can see here in these examples.

Page 2 from a 3 page plan set

Playing Peek a Boo

Posted on February 21, 2012 by orples

When I first got my Corel program and had not a clue as how to use it, I started by experimenting with some of the features. For practice, I made this little game sheet for my grandchildren to either cut out and paste, or to draw the squares into the squares. These types of puzzles were (and maybe still are popular) in the activities sections of some newspapers. Of course, you can draw the picture, then cut out the blocks and paste over your drawing too if you are really bored. Please feel free to print off and cut out these squares for your own use if you would like. Hopefully this will be big enough to work with. The original sheet I gave to my grandchildren to cut out is 8 1/2″ x 11″. I used card stock to print it on for better results.

Magi playing Peek a boo . game cutout sheet

Below is the actual photo I used as my ‘test’ subject. First, I obviously cropped the photo, then bit-mapped it. Corel has some cool features to distort the original photograph for an artsy look.