Want to learn shading and how lighting affects images? Watch some of those old black and white movies. Excellent lighting effects.

To help with image theft on the web, you can make sure your images are no more than 72 dpi in resolution. Someone can steal your images and put them on their site, but they won't be high enough quality to do any sort of printing with them.

Have some small pieces of wood you've collected and fear they might contain "critters" that will eventually come out? Place the wood in a microwave oven for a few minutes WITH a glass of water so that you don't damage the oven by running it "empty."

When tracing a pattern, use a red fine tipped pen. Next time use a blue, and a third time you can use black. That way you can use the same pattern 3 times and still keep track of what you have traced.

Here is a great tip from Cheryl:

When buffing out a wax finish, I have found that using my Black and Decker Mouse, with the polishing pad attached and then covered with a sock, can really save a lot of arm work and time. Plus you get an incredible shine, just like a real machine buff. Just use the Mouse as a mini buffer and the sock takes the bulk of the wax residue, preventing the polishing pad from getting gummed up too quickly.

Tip: If you need to arrange something on your scanner bed to scan, just do it on a piece of glass looking at the bottom of it as the scanner would. Then gently put it on the scanner. The scanned image will then be as you have arranged.