Who is Cassel?

My real name is Carole. I am married and a mother of three adults children living in Atlantic Canada. I am also a grandmother of one. French is my first language. English came later.

I have always loved crafts as I have tried many over the years. The most I do now would be computer graphics.

During the day, I used to work as a speech-language pathologist working in the community but I retired in 2021.

I started using PaintShop Pro, several years ago, when my mom gave me her copy of Paintshop Pro 7. She had just purchased version 8. I learned mostly on my own. At first, I didn’t know what to do with that program, besides following tutorials. Then someone asked me to create some graphic signatures. I did that for a few months.

Scrapbooking at work?

In 2005,  I started a project for work in the form of a baby book with language development information. It was in a scrapbook format. Since I used PaintShop Pro, I got my first taste of scrapbooking on the computer. That baby book has been published at 5000 copies immediately. A local program distributed them free of charge to all the French new moms in our province with the help of sponsors. Isn't that a cool way to help out using scrapbooking? It is easy to see how I  got hooked. It was quite an event when those books got delivered in my tiny office!

What else?

On the side, I have done karate for about 15 years, earning a black belt in 2007 after 8 years of training. That kepts me a bit active, while I would still prefer to sit at the computer and code! The club has not closed, and I started line dancing in 2022. I also enjoy geocaching, when I can get myself away from the computer long enough!

What is Creation Cassel?

I am always searching through my PaintShop Pro tools and functions, and I have found ways to create many scrapbook elements on my own and started to write tutorials. I started a teaching group where members learned how to create those elements themselves. This group had been going well for almost 3 years and reached hundreds of scrappers.

In 2007, I stumbled upon something called a "script". It was a script called VectorTube (which I still use regularly). I wanted to know how to place those tubes so neatly along a path, so I could teach my students. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that the script was simply smarter than I was and there was no way to manually replicate all that coding. However, this got me very curious about scripts, and early in 2008, I took a scripting course to learn how to write scripts for PaintShop Pro.

I have always been a bit envious of Photoshop users who seem to have tons of actions and I want PaintShop Pro users to have also quality scripts.

Selling resources

In 2007, I joined my first consignment store to start selling scripts. Over the years, I sold in several stores, but things have changed a lot, and all those stores have closed, one after the other, even some large ones. This simply led me to the idea of opening my own digital store, a place that would not be dependent of an outside owner, and where I could offer my products at the rate I wanted, offer sales when I wanted, and mostly, be able to answer to customer questions directly, without having to go through a middle person.

In 2009, Creation Cassel opened, and has since, offered products, mostly specialized for PaintShop Pro, but also a few extras. There are currently over 900 products in the store, all created by me, mostly for PaintShop Pro users. This blog will showcase every new product, and many free samples you can download to see, up close, what those products can create.

As for teaching PaintShop Pro, the Scrapbook Campus is where hundreds of classes and tutorials are available, for members and non-members.

If you have any questions or suggestions, do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] .