Archives for March 2017

Carol: Objects Inside Other Objects and Going Incognito

At the end of last week’s tutorial I announced that Carol (gnana96) had been selected to challenge my PSE skills. When I contacted her she told me she had two tricks she’d like to learn and couldn’t decided between them. They were both relatively simple so I decided to show her how to accomplish both. Ready, Carol?

In her message to me, she said she was building a recipe book and wanted to use cooking-related elements but was having trouble making them look right. She wanted to know how to put something (ground meat) into something else (a frying pan) so that it looked good. I don’t have those sorts of elements in my stash, so I’m going to use toys instead, but the principle is the same.

I pulled a wagon from a Wimpychompers kit called Chalk It Up (acquired via The Daily Digi). Then I grabbed a puppy and a frog from Boomers Girl Designs‘s Boys Will Be Boys. I proceeded to put the puppy and the frog into the wagon, so to ensure I had enough room to manoeuvre, I changed the Canvas Size. The long way is Image>Resize>Canvas Size [WorkSmartNotHard: CTRL/CMD>Alt>C]. Then I moved the wagon down to the bottom of the canvas.

To see where things needed to sit for the best effect, I put the puppy element and the frog element on layers on top of the wagon, resizing as necessary, and adjusted them so they didn’t extend below the bottom of the wagon. Then to make sure they were properly aligned I used the Align tool. To do that, select as many layers as you want to line up then go to the Tools work space. Determine which edge you want to line up, then click on the appropriate icon – NOT the descriptor, because that does nothing!

Then, with both puppy and frog layers still selected, I moved them under the wagon on the Layers panel. Now it looked like they were inside the wagon, and that might have been enough (ground meat in a pan) but these little things have articulating limbs, so I could take them another step toward really looking like they were inside the wagon.

I wanted to have one of the frog’s legs and one of the puppy’s legs hanging down over the side of the wagon, so I created a Layer Mask. (Lots of previous tutorials have used Layer Masks, so if you’ve read those ones, feel free to skip ahead.) The reason for using a Layer Mask is to give more control over what happens to an image. Layer>Layer Mask>Reveal All [WSNH: Click on the blue-square-gray-circle icon at the top of the Layers panel]

Now I was ready to erase the wagon where it overlaid the frog’s leg. Make sure you’re on the Layer Mask, not the actual element. I selected the Eraser tool with white as my foreground colour.  (Black Conceals, White Reveals) You can toggle between white and black using the X key.

Don’t worry if you erase more of the object than necessary, because you can switch from erasing to painting back by toggling foreground colours. I did the same process to reveal one of the puppy’s legs too.

I zoomed in really close for the painting-back step so I could see exactly where the limb’s edges were. Looking good!

Once I was satisfied the image looked perfect, I right-clicked on the layer in the Layers panel and selected Simplify. That incorporated the masked areas into the layer and eliminated the risk of messing it up. But…

The detailed images of the frog and the puppy had shadows where they overlaid the critters’ bodies. Shouldn’t there also be shadows on the side of the wagon? Simply using a drop shadow Layer Style isn’t going to help (even though I DID use one at this step so that the frog threw a shadow on the puppy where they overlapped) because the layer’s shadow will be behind the wagon. What to do?

Drop Shadow brushes to the rescue!! These brushes come preloaded with your PSE software, so just look in your Brushes menu for them. Remember, for ease of adjustments later, put your brushes on their OWN LAYER. For this step, don’t worry about the Opacity of the brush, just pay attention to the colour you’ve chosen and the size of the shadow you’re extending. It’ll take some trial and error to get it right so be patient! Following the direction of the light source the designer used, I painted in my shadows.

When I was done, I wanted to soften the edges of the shadows. Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur will do that nicely.

I pulled the slider to the right to increase the radius of the blurring, and watched the actual image as I went along. When the shadows I’d painted blended into the shadows on my little frog, I selected OK. Then I decreased the Opacity of this shadow layer to seamlessly blend the edges in. You can adjust Opacity first and then Blur if you like. It might give you more control, so try it both ways to see what works best. CTRL/CMD>Z  (Undo) is your best friend!

I repeated the process for the puppy. When I was finished, I knew I wanted to Merge the layers together to move them to my layout as one object.

After selecting all the layers, I merged them as shown. (You’re saying, “Yeah, sure… you used the keyboard shortcut.” And you’re correct!) Then I carried on with building my March 2017 Inspiration Challenge layout.

When choosing something that makes me happy – the theme of the Inspiration Challenge – the first thoughts that come to mind are thoughts of my grandchildren. The second of Carol’s requests was about concealing the identities of her older grands, who value their privacy. So this was a natural! Little A isn’t concealed at all below, is he? I clicked on the Quick Selection Tool, which many people just call the Magic Wand. Using it, I outlined his little face, which put a line of marching ants around it. That’s my “selection”.

Then I went to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur just as I did for my limb shadows above.

A little tug to the right and his features are blurred, but his expression is still discernable. It’s really that easy! To conceal parts of her journaling, Carol could select the words in question on her text layer (simplified, of course!) using the Rectangular Marquee tool then blurring the very same way. Now Carol (and all the rest of you grandmothers out there) can scrap photos of her older grands as often as she wants.

Remember, if you’ve used a technique from these tutorials, post your finished layout in the GingerScraps Facebook Tutorial Tuesday Challenge Gallery for an opportunity to have YOUR chance to challenge me. If you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link to the layout you’ve created with the tutorial you used in the comments section here on the Blog. I’ll get a notification and will then enter you into the draw. The first week of each month I’ll have a random draw of all entries and the winner will be announced at the end of the first tutorial of that month.

See you all next week!

Down on the Border (not the Little River Band version)

A while back some of my fellow Sugar Cookies (praise team members) and I were kicking around ideas for tutorial topics. I usually have some ideas about what I can show you, but coming up with new, fresh lessons every week isn’t as easy as it sounds. So my Cookie gals gave me a couple of ideas that I could use for quick tuts, and this was one of them. Well, not precisely what was suggested, but I think it’s even better! I’m going to show you how to build a border, using repeating shapes. I could have taken the easy route and showed you how to make a simple scalloped border that some template designers use routinely, but I thought, no… let’s do something with a little more vision. And here we are…

I didn’t do the Signature Challenge in February (it’s a difficult month for me and I can’t get excited about it) so it was time for a new siggie. March doesn’t mean spring in this part of the world – we still have snow well into April most years – but March has other wonderful implications. Both my daughters were born in March, and St Paddy’s Day is right in the middle. Since I’m mostly Irish by ancestry, my March siggie will always include some reminders of those good things. And that led me to create a border of shamrocks, using the Custom Shape tool.

The first task before you can get going is to open a new file work space in PSE. If you want your border to extend from edge to edge on your layout, choose that measure for one of the dimensions, and go with 1 or 2 inches for the other. Because I was doing a siggie, I selected the same dimensions I described in the tutorial on signatures. I also added a grid so my shape could be easily sized. But you can do that even more simply by setting Defined Proportions. When you use this setting your Custom Shape tool will automatically give you a shape in exactly those dimensions.

I usually select All Elements Shapes from the pop-up menu when I open up the Custom Shape tool so I have a wide variety of choices. I know there are all four playing card suits represented as standard shapes, so I went right there and chose the CLUBS shape – which is a shamrock! (Real shamrocks have three leaves, not four.)

Once I had all that figured out, I went ahead and made a shamrock shape on my canvas. You can use the grid, or not. I’ve played around with using the grid and and without – either method will work just fine.

I knew I wanted the shamrock border to extend from one side of my canvas to the other, so I Simplified my shape to get rid of the extraneous stuff the software puts on a shape layer.

Then I made a stack of copies, all identical to my first shape. [Work Smart Not Hard tip: CTRL/CMD>J duplicates your layer.]

The software stacks them one on top of the other, so when I had as many copies as I thought I’d need, I selected only the top-most shape and moved it all the way to the other side of my canvas. Once I had shapes at each side, I selected ALL the shape layers. Then I went down to the Tool Options menu and clicked on Distribute>Middle.

Whoa! All my shapes lined themselves up in a nice, tidy, evenly-spaced line! (This is a fabulous tip to use when you’re putting buttons in a row, or lines of stitches, or almost any objects you can come up with.)

There was some space in between my shapes, which won’t work well for a continuous border, so I nudged them until they were all very slightly overlapping. Then I resized the whole group of them to regain my edge-to-edge border.

Then I decided to get fancy. So I tilted some of them to the right, and others to the left. If you’re a little OCD (like I am) you can use the tool settings to make the tilts uniform, simply by keying in the angle you want. Tilting to the right uses a positive number, to the left a negative.

Once I was happy with the way it all looked, I merged the layers. [WSNH tip: Select all the layers you want to merge, then CTRL/CMD>E] And now I had a clipping mask!

Once I clipped a paper to it, my border was done! (Almost…) [WSNH tip: CTRL/CMD>G to clip the current layer to the layer below it.]

I looked at my border for a couple of minutes and decided it needed some inked edges. Keep your brush size a little bigger than you think you want, because otherwise it won’t fade away into the paper in that nice way you want it to.

When your edges are all inked, create another clipping mask [CTRL/CMD>G] and cut away the brush edges that extend past your border.  Then you can adjust the Opacity of your brush until you like the way it looks. Finish up by merging [CTRL/CMD>E] the ink mask with the border. And you’re done!

Remember, if you’ve used a technique from these tutorials, post your finished layout in the GingerScraps Facebook Tutorial Tuesday Challenge Gallery for an opportunity to have YOUR chance to challenge me. If you’re not a Facebooker, you can post a link to the layout you’ve created with the tutorial you used in the comments section here on the Blog. I’ll get a notification and will then enter you into the draw. The first week of each month I’ll have a random draw of all entries and the winner will be announced at the end of the first tutorial of that month.

At the end of February there were 4 names on the list of people who had either posted a layout to the Tutorial Tuesday Challenge Gallery on Facebook or posted a link to a layout in the Blog comments section. Mr Random chose Carol’s name (gnana96) … Carol!! Think about what you’d like me to show you and your peers for next week, send me a PM and I’ll get right on it!