This year has been one of ups and downs for  Wildheart’s Works. I have had  many many challenges to say the least. However, with each one I have risen above somehow and  have  finally  found a soft place to land  at years  end.

First my personal struggles. I decided this time last year to leave my then boyfriend of 5 years and moved into a one bedroom apartment with me and my son and my cat Skye. It hadn’t even been just a little over a month in the new place and it caught fire. I lost my cat Skye in the fire. We were soon relocated in the complex into another building. During this time I was also recovering from nasal surgery and then my son had also contractedpneumonia . I had my car stereo stolen twice, my books stolen and my sons video games as well as my purse over the course of the last year living in the neighborhood I was in. I lost my child support as well due to the fact that my sons father had lost his work release privileges in prison.

Now on to other developments this year. I have been the chairwoman of my Women of the ELCA group for the last year and am looking at carrying it over to the next year. We lost two members this year and one member ended up in the hospital. I secured a student associate position for Campus Ministry at Washburn University and was in charge of coming up with a new banner design for the banner that we hang in the union. I have been asked to help out in the design of a building proposal for the new campus ministry facility. I have also been busy with school as well as helping my son adjust to being mainstreamed into a regular classroom setting. He is involved in Upward Basketball this winter and from the way it looks his coach is going to be a good fit for him.I also have moved this month to a townhouse in a better neighborhood. This place will allow for me to give my full attention toWildheart’s Works.

Next let’s look at my huge accomplishment with Wildheart’s Works. I am amazed at how much things have improved numbers wise since making the move to another blog platform and also having my own hosting and registered domain. I secured the domainwildheartsworks .com around September and began the process of moving to Word Press. The learning curve wasn’t so bad this time around with the exception that I had to learn how to use an FTP client. Once I figured that out it was all smooth sailing. I had the beautiful day theme but I felt that it wasn’t going to grow with me as time evolved and so would my blog so I found this theme called Hitch 1.0. I loved the wow factor with this theme and it was love at first site.

I also want to mention that utilizing the techniques I have learned on The 30DC coupled with Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind Program have really helped me to become a better blogger and more focused.I will share my secret strategy in 2008.

Let me share with you some of the statistics over the last four months since moving and starting over.

1. September- 9836 Hits(not bad for a launch in mid month)
2. October     42607 Hits
3. November   31420 Hits
4. December   17510 Hits

My most popular posts were how to make camouflage with paint shop pro and my offering of free textures. I have been searched more on Google and have enjoyed my traffic from Google,StumbleUpon, Digg, and redditt. My last offering of textures to Karen’s readers has also gotten me some nice traffic as well.

The reason I had such a sharp decline in traffic from November to December is that December is a hard month for me emotionally. So I wasn’t doing much as I think I had settled into a depression of sorts this last month without even realizing it.

I think 2008 for me on this blog will see me continuing to post paint shop pro related articles as I show people how to do things with this great dual purpose program. It will also see me trying to continue to add my own designs as well. I will be looking to find bloggers in my niche to spotlight, and to guest blog for. I will be trying to get in more product reviews of design software too. Oh and a few other surprises.

So here is to 2008! Let’s make it great.

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Thank you for visiting Wildheart's Works! Please donate to my digital camera fund at the top right side bar and also take a moment to subscribe to My RSS feed to continue to get more design and internet how to tips and tricks !.Have a great day!

I was visiting a site called Heart a Day I think it was yesterday and I came upon  a heart design   and thought I would try to replicate it as close as I could with paint shop pro.

I used a sunset gradient, angel-0,repeats-0,Invert checked and linear.

Then I went into adjust,blur,gausian blur with a radius of 45. I selected the mesh warp tool and just kind of played with it until I got the colors the way I wanted them to go and then found a heart preset,used the clone brush to soften the edges and then repeated the gausian blur. I then went into my tubes and added the heart globe,the globe stand and the twinkles then went to my frames and picked the taped edges,took my color picker and went into the design to choose a complementary color for the frame.

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 I have been working on making some textures on Second Life and thought I would also make the same textures available here on Wildheart’s Works.

Most of them were actually made using a gradient and a mask. I used the texture effect as well.

Please feel free to snag away. Just mention my blog to others that share the same addictions with paint shop pro and phtotoshop.  

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