Here’s what the company says about their software:
“NeoPaint is a full featured artist’s studio for Windows that’s easy-to-learn, powerful and fun! It’s simple enough for beginners yet packed with powerful features and advanced tools. NeoPaint makes it easy for business and home users to touch up photographs and create great looking graphics for desktop publishing, presentations and the Internet!  NeoPaint supports Animated GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, ICO, PCX, TIF and more. Includes many paint and photo retouching tools, natural media and custom brushes, 2D/3D shapes, soften, sharpen, red-eye, special effects, masking, textures, color separations, stamps, multi-level undo, rulers, grids, gradients, image browser, screen capture and more.”

There are so many cool and fun effects you can create for your craft projects with this type of software.  This is a very basic program that is great for kids or beginners with which to get started.  Kids can just play with it for fun without needing to create a specific project.  Since you get to try it out for free, you’ve got nothing to lose if you find it doesn’t have as many features as you wanted.

Remember, it’s only available today, so click here to get it.

Happy Crafting,

AJ

Hematite Handmade Earrings

If your mom is like most, then she probably has her ears pierced.  I recently posted instruction on how to make handmade earrings, so I thought I’d continue to post different handmade earring projects that you can easily recreate.

These earrings appeal to lots of people because of the hematite beads used.  Hematite is that beautiful black/grey stone that goes well with lots of different outfits – hence the broad appeal.  Basically, when you are making earrings for someone and you’re not sure what colors they like or wear often, make earrings that go with almost anything.

You can refer to my original article regarding how to make handmade earrings for step-by-step instructions.  In this post, I will give you the details about how I stacked the beads I used (see picture).  When stacking the beads on your wire posts, start from the bottom and layer one on top of another as follows:

1.  Silver seed bead

2.  Hematite tube bead

3.  Silver seed bead

4.  Hematite round bead

5.  Silver seed bead

6.  Hematite tube bead

7.  Silver seed bead

The design of these earrings is very simple and classy.  They can be worn with a casual outfit or something fancier, as well.  If this design doesn’t match the personality of the person you are giving them to, I encourage you to mix and match these beads in a way that you like.  If you have a mother and a mother-in-law, you could make them each a pair of the same design or vary each pair somewhat to customize the design for each person.  If you go to your local bead store and can’t find an exact match to the beads I used, don’t panic.  Keep in mind the basic elements of the design, and then substitute different beads based on what is available.   At the very least, I hope this project inspires you and gives you a place to start making your own handmade earrings for Mother’s Day and other occasion throughout the year, such as birthday gifts, thank you gifts, Christmas gifts and more.

Happy Crafting,

AJ