diy Archives - CLEVERcreating

How to Improve the Colour Quality of your Printed Pictures

June 12, 2023June 12, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

The quality of the printers is improving fast. Nowadays a lot of colour printers have more than four cartridges, making sure all the tones are printed.

Yet, the extra cartridges are grey or black, never a colour, which means there are still colours you see on the screen that can’t be printed on paper.

Taking pictures and printing them on your colour printer can be disappointing. Sometimes the result is NOT what you expected. I’ll give you the reasons for that disappointing result and whether you can improve the colour quality of your precious photographs.

How to Format an eBook for Publishing? 7 Tips on Technique and Execution

June 2, 2023June 2, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

This article is about the technique and explains how to format an eBook for publishing. Once you have written a book you can outsource the process that comes after that. But if you are like me, you want to do a lot of the process yourself in order to make your eBook as perfect as possible.

There are many eBooks on offer that are not – strictly speaking – an eBook. At some time I made a PDF for this website – 20 Tips: How to get the most out of a Museum Visit. A PDF is actually not an eBook, even though everybody including me, calls it that way.

A Japanese Bookbinding Tutorial to Save Your Art Sustainable

April 14, 2023April 14, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Lately, I’ve been making a lot of collages and cyanotypes on heavy paper. I keep most of them in a drawer where they subsequently rarely come out.

That’s why I was looking for a way to bind the nicest ones into a booklet that I can easily take with me to show to others.

In another article, I described how to make booklets from plain paper, but these methods were unsuitable for thicker paper or single sheets. The Japanese bookbinding method I have tried is perfect.

How to Use Layers in Photoshop to Make a Festive Easter Card

April 5, 2023April 4, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Using layers in any creative computer program is a marvellous way to enhance our creativity. In this article, I will explain how to use layers in Photoshop, applied to an Easter card.

Once you know how to benefit from working with layers, you can use them for any kind of creative expression.

Besides using them for masking, I often toggle between layers to turn them ‘on’ and ‘off’ so I can judge differences. Making variations and looking at which one pleases me most, is easy that way.

How to Make a Booklet by Folding Paper as a Marvellous Gift

March 20, 2023March 20, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Sometimes the budget is scarce and the wish to make an outstanding item is big. For example, you want to have a great present for a birthday or anniversary. Or you want a gift as a souvenir at a customer meeting, like a friend and I did.

In this article, I explain how to make a booklet by folding it, without the need for any other resources but paper and an A3 printer.

And I show another way of folding a booklet for which you don’t need a printer unless you want to use text.

Intermezzo – Get Inspiration from Creativity

February 27, 2023February 27, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Inspiration and creativity are must-haves for me. I make drawings, collages or mixed media in some kind of theme.

It helps me keep my creative skills flowing.

An intermezzo is a short piece of music written to be played on its own or as part of a longer piece. For me, it’s a welcome break from my daily activities.

In the video are a couple of examples.

3 Ideas for DIY Valentine Cards that are Simple and Beautiful

January 30, 2023January 30, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Even if you consider yourself as non-creative, as a lot of people unjustifiable do, it’s pretty simple to make something.

These 3 ideas for DIY Valentine cards will inspire you to have a fun afternoon beforehand and a great day on February 14th.

Valentine’s Day used to be about secret love, yet has turned into a commercial fest. Personally, I don’t like that. It’s so simple to go to a store and buy all kinds of stuff, or even order it online.

Ceramics in Magical Colours. How to Use the Colour of Clay Itself?

January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Decorating your ceramics can be done in many ways. Your clay object can be glazed or painted with engobes and underglazes. Even screen printing or applying transfers are possibilities.

A pure way of working is using the colour of the clay itself with at most a transparent glaze to emphasize the colours and make the object watertight.

Clay has different colours depending on the substances in the soil of the quarry. The clay you buy in the shops usually has only a few colours: it’s white, red, or ‘black’ (rather dark brown) after firing. Due to the industrialized process, the tones are generally the same every time.

Dyeing with Plants, a Natural Way of Colouring Fabric or Paper

January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 by Hannie Mommers

Botanical colouring, natural colouring, or plant colouring are different names for dyeing with plants. All with the objective of having a toxic-free or almost toxic-free dyeing process.

When I was a ceramicist, I was very interested in the way colours are produced.

I made my own coloured slips for years and when I wrote my article about the different colours of clay my interest in natural colouring, in general, was aroused once again.