Journaling INside the Box!

Greetings GingerScrappers! I’m hoping against hope the big server swap-out goes smoothly and quickly so nobody misses out on anything around here. I’m actually at work today – but you know nurses are capable of being in two places at one time (or at least the hospital thinks we are…) so you’re still going to get your dose of PSE instruction. Today we’re going with something really simple and straight-forward. Carol (user name gnana) requested a lesson on putting text inside a shape. Sadly with PSE, we’re limited to the custom shapes available within the software, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be creative! So let’s have a look…

I was putting together a Chanukah layout for the January Recipe Challenge the other day, using Tracey Monette‘s (aka Clever Monkey Graphics) Hanukkah Oy kit and wanted to put my journaling inside a Star of David. (I made this tag out of an element and some paper.) See how I’ve selected the Custom Shape Tool below? The pop-up menu will automatically give you the Default Shapes so go ahead and select Show All then pick a shape that’s close to the one you want to journal within.

The best the software could do for me was a sheriff’s badge. So I went with that. I put my cursor on the tag then left-click>dragged out the shape to the size I wanted. (Make the shape as large as you can without extending past the edges of your item. You can always reposition it once you’ve got the shape and size you want.) The shape will then appear in your Layers Panel.

I don’t know about you, but I have a gazillion fonts and choosing the one I want to use is painfully difficult. So when I heard about wordmark.it I knew I’d use it a LOT! All you do is go to the website and pop some of your text into the box at the centre of the black band at the top. The site will then show you what it looks like in every font on your hard drive. How awesome is that?

Once I decided on the font I wanted to use (which isn’t the one shown in the screenshot… I actually used one called Worship Display, which seemed to be an appropriate choice) I made sure Horizontal Type Tool was selected. Then when I moved my cursor over to the shape layer, I got a slightly modified text cursor that looks a little like I’ve shown you below. That’s how you know it’s going to do what you want.

Sizing your text will determine how well your text fills the space. I could have gone smaller with the font, used more words and extended my text a little closer to the edges but the shape wasn’t huge and I wanted to be able to read it. You may well have to adjust what you want to say to make sure it all fits inside your shape. See how my text fits neatly and has a nice border around it?

I zoomed out a bit so you can see the entire text and how it fits.

Of course, I don’t want that white sheriff’s badge to stay there. When I turn the visibility of the shape layer off, my text remains and is still exactly where I put it. So guess what! That layer can just be deleted altogether. Cool, right?

So now you can go ahead and make your own tag shapes for journaling and have a polished look to your finished layout. The easiest way to do that is to create a shape. Then make a copy of that shape (CTRL/CMD+J) and simplify them (right-click on the layer>Simplify Layer) so you can play with them. Make the bottom one a little larger than the one on top so you have a nice border. Then clip papers to each layer. Bingo!

I hope you’re having fun learning new tricks! See you all next week.

Sizzling Signatures!

It’s a brand new month, a brand new year and it’s time for a brand new siggie. Signatures… we all have one. Our online presence is greatly enhanced by having a pretty one, or an intriguing one, or a sizzling one. The January 2017 Signature Challenge hosted by CathyK Designs asks us to use glitter in our signature and there’s so many ways we can do that. (psst…. any text that is bold and green is linked to the very spot in the forum, store or gallery I’m talking about… you can just click on it and you’re there!) I know there are some of you who find creating signatures to be a daunting thought – largely due to the very teenytiny size required – so I’m going to give you some tips on making yours fabulous. The guidelines given for these files is that they can’t be bigger than 750 x 150 pixels. But who can create in a space that small? I sure can’t. So I start out with a file size FIVE TIMES the guideline size so I can see what the heck I’m doing.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is my own workflow and it works for me, so don’t feel like you have to follow these instructions to the letter – they aren’t INSTRUCTIONS, they’re SUGGESTIONS. Anyway, I like to make a folder for each of my challenge layouts where I collect all the items I want to use in one place. I copy the elements and alphas from their original folders into the new dedicated folder, as I’ve shown below. Then it’s a simple matter of highlighting all the items in the folder and opening them all at once, as a batch.

As you can see, I’m using a kit from Ooh La La Scraps called In the Frosty Air. I chose this one because it has glittery paper in it and because Katie almost always has an alphabet or six and a collection of styles that coordinate with her collections. My name is short, so I like to use an alpha or font with some presence. This one worked for me. If your name has quite a few letters, you can use a skinnier alpha and still make a statement about who you are. Spacing is up to you, whatever is pleasing to your eye. See that I have all three letter layers selected. This is because I want to centre the letters on my palette; I can move them all together without messing up my spacing.

The easiest way to centre a group of items like this is to pull a guideline out to the centre of the workspace. It’s a bit hard to see it in the image below so I used a honking huge arrow. If you’ve never used a guideline before here’s how: Put your cursor right on the edge of your workspace –  either the very top, where I have a ruler visible, or on the left side, where I also have a ruler that isn’t shown below – then click and drag until you’ve got it where you want it. You can also see that I’ve merged my letter layers into a single layer.

I want to put a glitter paper border around my alpha to jazz it up and to meet the challenge criteria. I messed up my screenshots, so let’s pretend I’ve already dragged my glittery paper onto the workspace. Now I’m going to create an outline of my alpha by selecting the edges – clicking on the Layer Thumbnail. That puts some marching ants around the edges.

Then I clicked on Select>Modify>Expand to create a nice border around my alpha.

The pop-up menu looks like this. I chose 20 pixels, after some trial and error. Just enter a number in the box then see what it looks like. You can always CTRL/CMD+Z out of anything you’re not happy with.

See where the marching ants are now? 20 pixels gives me a nice border, visible but not overpowering.

While I still had the alpha layer highlighted, I inverted the selection, since I want to “cut” the excess paper away from my outline. Clicking on Select>Inverse in the Tabs is the same as CTRL/CMD+Shift+I.

Don’t forget to change the selected layer to the glittery paper. If you forget, when you Edit>Cut (CTRL/CMD+X) you’ll just delete your alpha from its layer. Not what you’re going for.

So now I have a glittery border around my name. I went ahead and added the various elements I chose for my siggie and was pretty happy with it. BUT… I decided I wanted to glitter up one of the snowflakes in the scatter I used. So I duplicated (CTRL/CMD+J) the layer. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool I selected one of the large snowflakes from the duplicated layer then Cut it (CTRL/CMD+X) and Pasted (CTRL/CMD+V) it onto its own layer. I turned the visibility of the two scatter layers off so I could see what I had. Oh, there’s a sequin there. Don’t want to glitter that up, it’s already glittery! So I created a Layer Mask by clicking on the blue rectangle at the top of the Layers panel. The mask is that white strip to the right of the Layer Thumbnail. You’re probably asking why I didn’t just use the Eraser tool to erase the sequin. I could do that, but if I accidentally had a dog land on my laptop as I was erasing and I erased most of the snowflake too, I’d have to go back to the beginning of the process. This way, if I erase too much, I can paint whatever I didn’t want gone back in. Remember, white conceals and black reveals.

With the Eraser tool and a white foreground colour, I carefully erased the sequin. If I’d slipped and took off one of the points on my snowflake, changing the foreground colour to black (the X key does that for me without having to click on the little bidirectional arrow) and un-erasing over that spot will bring it back. Once I had the sequin erased and the snowflake all perfect, the layer had to be Simplified. Right-click somewhere in the blue area on the selected layer then choose Simplify Layer.

Next I opened up my Effects Panel and chose the Glitter Style from Ooh La La Scraps’ In the Frosty Air styles menu. I decided I wanted the aqua fine glitter style and double-clicked on it to apply it to my snowflake. Woohoo!

Then I went ahead and deleted the duplicated layer of the snowflake scatter… the one that I had cut the snowflake from. The original snowflake scatter layer is visible again too.

Then I shadowed all my layers so they’d have some nice oomph. Don’t forget this step! You still want your siggie to look three dimensional and pretty.

When you love how your name looks with all its finery around it, it’s time to shrink it to fit the guidelines. You can follow the steps shown below, or go the quick way with a keyboard shortcut (CTRL/CMD+ALT+I).

These are the settings I recommend. Make sure you’ve checked those boxes at the bottom. When you do it this way, you can change the pixel counts and all the other settings automatically change too. This is helpful for posting to the gallery, because you can just resize your image to 600×600 this way.

See how teensy the image is now? But I promise, the details have been totally preserved. I like my siggie to have a transparent background. If you save it as a JPEG, it will have a white background. So what I do is select Save As…  (CTRL/CMD+Shift+S).

In the Save As menu, I choose PNG and give it a name that I’ll be able to recognize later. And I save it into the same folder I had all my elements in already. Gotta keep it all together in one place…

The PNG menu looks like this. Just save it as I’ve shown.

Now you can add your signature to your GingerScraps Forum profile! First, post your siggie to your gallery. Open up GingerScraps in a new tab to save yourself some work. On that second tab, go to the Forum and select Settings from the upper right hand side of the screen just below the banner. Then select Edit Signature.

I already had a siggie that I’m now going to replace. So I clicked on the old siggie, turning it blue, then hit the Delete key.

Then go back to the first tab, where you have your siggie selected in your gallery. Right-click on the image and select Copy image address.

Flip back to the tab where you’ve got your settings open and click on the Image icon. If you want your siggie to be centred under your forum posts, make sure you have that control selected.

Then paste the image address in the URL box as shown, then click OK.

That’s all! When you see the image of your siggie appear, you just have to click on Save Signature and you’re all done!!

Some tips for eye-catching signature files:

• Use a font or alpha with some weight to it so it stands out.
• Balance your signature: if you centre your name, have something on each side of it so it looks somewhat symmetrical.
• If you want your name at one side of the signature, have an element that leads the eye either to it or away from it.
• Don’t forget your shadows! But keep scale in mind. You don’t want your shadows to be all people notice.
• Adding CT information or other text to your siggie needs a bold font because it’s going to be very tiny when you’re done. You want people to be able to read what you’ve written.
• Your name is more than just your name, it’s a representation of who you are! So make it fabulous!!

Last thoughts: Last week I mentioned an unofficial Tutorial Tuesday Challenge. There is now a Challenge Gallery on our GS Facebook Fan Page for those who have FB accounts. For those who don’t, a link to your layout in the GingerScraps Gallery in the comments here on the Blog will get you an entry too. At the beginning of each month I’ll check both places for participants and Mr Random will select the winner. So start thinking about what we can learn together.

Kustomize Your Kits!

Are you all ready for another Tutorial Tuesday? You might recall that I mentioned I’m always looking for new ideas for these posts and that if you had something you’d like to try but didn’t know how to get started, you could post to the GingerScraps Facebook Fan Page. Well, Ellen (GingerScraps member name gmae) doesn’t have a Facebook account so she sent me a private message. She wants to know how to recolour elements to coordinate better with her photos. So I used this opportunity to put together a  for the December Inspiration Challenge while playing around with colours. I used a kit by  BoomersGirl Designs called Good Morning Sunshine and a Tinci Designs template from Autumn Stories 4.

There are several different techniques you can use that produce different results. Don’t be alarmed by the number of screenshots in this tut, most of them are results images. You can easily skim through the whole post and then come back to a specific technique later. These posts are always tagged Tutorial Tuesday and the posts don’t expire, so they’re easy to find. There will also be a link to each of them on the GS Facebook Fan Page.

Let’s start with a button. This one has a variety of different colours in it, and it’s the pink that I want to change a bit.

I selected a shade of pink from one of my photos that has a bit more orange in it for my change. Select the Color Picker (eye dropper) tool and then click on the spot on your photo that you want to pick up.

In the screenshot above, my new pink is in the foreground. It has to move to the background for the next step so to do that I clicked on that little two-pointed arrow and moved it to the background.

Then I selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color from the tabular menu at the top of my workspace.

This is what the pop-up menu for Replace Color looks like. With the Color Picker selected, I clicked on the pink of the button. Now both colour boxes have the same shade of pink in them.

**Here’s why the more orange-y pink had to be moved to the background. See how the foreground colour has also changed to the pink from the button? I used to always forget to move my desired colour to the background and made a lot of extra work for myself.

To change the button pink to my more orange-y pink, I clicked on the colour box in the Replacement section of the menu, then clicked on the BACKGROUND colour box.

The Color Picker menu pops up and shows how the colour will be changed. If I wasn’t totally happy with the colour I’d already put in the background, I could now adjust it with this menu by moving my cursor.

Once I clicked OK in the Color Picker menu this is how the Replace Color menu looked.

And here is the transformed button. The difference isn’t in your face, but it’s definitely noticeable. (I later decided to change the green a bit too, and used the same technique.)

Let’s do a fairly simple flower next. This is one of the easiest ways of adjusting a colour. If you need to, you can drag and drop the item you want to customize onto your photo so you can see the change and know when to stop tweaking. For this adjustment, I selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation (keyboard shortcut is CTRL/CMD+U).

The pop-up menu looks like this.

Sliding the Hue adjuster in the Master channel to the left did this:

And sliding it to the right did this:

To get a similar orange-y pink as I used before, these are the sliders I moved and their final positions. Notice that the gray and white area didn’t change, but the brad in the centre did. And the shading and highlights are adjusted for uniformity.

The next thing I played with was this spray of leaves. I wanted it to be a caramel colour. Same process as for the flower above to begin with, I did something a bit different in the next step.

This time I only want to change the Yellows, so I clicked on the little triangle of the Channel selector and chose Yellows. (Keyboard shortcut: CTRL/CMD+4)

I moved all of the sliders this time, until I had the colour I wanted.

Let’s change ONE COLOUR in a patterned paper! Using the Color Picker tool again I chose the colour I wanted to change by clicking on a green dot on the paper. When the Color Picker menu opened, I then moved the slider on the little rainbow toward the blue end a little. I didn’t change the saturation or value of the colour, only the hue.

Since I’m going to replace the olive-y green with a more minty shade, I moved my desired colour to the background, just like I did for the button. (Keyboard shortcut for switching foreground and background colours: simply the letter X)

And then I again selected Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color.

I had to tell the software what colour I was replacing, just as for the button.

See how there’s a scattering of dots? That’s where the magic will happen.

I then clicked on the bottom colour box in the Replacement section of the menu and clicked on my background colour over on the Tool panel.

Can you see the change?

Let’s look at yet another way of adjusting the appearance of our elements with this star. I used the Magic Wand selection tool to select the pink corrugated centre of this element because I don’t want to change the brown border. The next steps will only change what’s inside the marching ants.

This time I’m going to Adjust Color Curves in the Enhance menu.

This is what the pop-up menu looks like. I stayed with the Default curves to start with. When I moved the sliders for Highlights, Midtone Brightness, Midtone Contrast and Shadows, the graph on the right changed as well. The difference is obvious, but still subtle.

Another adjustment that can be made to slightly alter colour is to adjust the Lighting. I’ll show you how adjusting Levels changes the same area of the star. (Keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+L)

This is the pop-up menu for this enhancement. You can change the channel you want to adjust, and you have both Input Levels and Output Levels to adjust. Play with them a bit so you can see what they do.

These are the settings I chose. You can see in the image behind the menu what the changes have done.

The title I wanted to use for my layout was the same bright pink as everything else. So I used Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation (CTRL/CMD+U) again. Once I had it on my layout I made a few more tweaks, since I could see it clearly close to the more orange-y pink of my other customizations.

These are my initial adjustments.

Last but not least, I wanted to show you how to customize fabric or natural flowers with gradations of colour and shadow. This is just a random flower I pulled from the GingerBread Ladies collab By the Dozen.

The images below are pretty self-explanatory. You can easily see how different adjustments change the colour and appearance of the flower.

Pulling the sliders all the way to one side or the other results in almost identical appearances.

Here are some examples of what little tweaks can do.

You may have noticed that the little centre of the flower also changes with each of these adjustments. You might not want that, especially if it’s a button, brad, or some other item that looks odd when recoloured. So here’s how to avoid that. Use the Magic Wand tool to select the area you DON’T want to change.

As you’ve probably noticed above, you can adjust only what is selected, as I showed you with the star. That’s NOT what we want to do here, so we’re going to INVERT our selection. (CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+I) That moves the marching ants to the rest of the image.

I did exactly the same adjustments on the Reds channel as above, but the centre isn’t touched. Cool, right?

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but I think you’ve got lots of options to be going on with. Give it a whirl!

Ellen also had another suggestion, which was sheer BRILLIANCE! She asked if it would be possible for me to run a monthly challenge, similar to but separate from, the GingerScraps monthly challenges that are already well-established. I mulled it over and this is what I’ve come up with. Each month there will be 4 or 5 different tutorials posted. Everyone who creates a layout using one of that month’s tutorials and posts their layout on the GS Facebook Fan Page, tagged Tutorial Tuesday Challenge, or posts a link in the comments below the month’s final tut, will be entered into a random draw. The results of the draw will be posted in both locations and the winner will get to pick the topic for one of the upcoming tutorials. How does that sound?

To recap:

• Create a layout using one of the month’s tutorials
• Post your layout to the GS Facebook Fan Page, or a link to it in the Blog post comments. Tag the post/comment with Tutorial Tuesday <insert month here> Challenge.
• Think about what you’d like me to write about next.
• Wait until the end of the month when Mr. Random chooses a winner.

Happy New Year, y’all!

Reverse Stencilling with Brushes

Season’s greetings all you GingerScrappers! The countdown is on… This year Hanukkah and Christmas collide, making this week probably the busiest of the year for so many of us as we prepare for the celebration of miracles and love. So I’m bringing you another quick and easy technique for jazzing up your layouts, one that won’t take more than a few minutes to try. Let’s get going.

This technique is another digital version of a paper-scrapping and crafting one similar to the inked edges technique I showed you a couple of Tuesdays ago… without the mess. Reverse stenciling is super-simple digitally – the hard part is choosing your tools! For this tutorial I’ve used a gorgeous bundle called In the Frosty Air from the brilliant Katie of Ooh La La Scraps. I’m also using a fabulous template in the Christmas Steps 1 collection from the lovely Krisztina, aka Tinci Designs. The layout is for the Scraplift Challenge, hosted this month by Ginger of Dandelion Dust Designs.

You might notice that I’ve flipped the template horizontally, because that worked better for my photo. We’re going to be working on the background layer, so I’ve turned off the visibility for all the layers BUT the background. That way I can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re a faithful reader, you’ll remember how to do this quickly, but to review… Roll your cursor over the little eyeball icons while holding down the Left Click button and all the eyes will close.

My background paper is a very neutral grungy gray and I’m using acrylic snowflakes from In the Frost Air, which means they’re VERY hard to see in this step. So I’ve circled them for you below. Squint really hard… there they are! As you might also notice, I have all the snowflake layers selected in the Layers panel. That’s because I’m going to merge the snowflakes into a single layer.

I wanted the paint layer to be this beautiful, cool minty green, so I used the Color Picker to select a spot from the chevron paper.

The next step is to create an NEW layer just above the snowflake layer. DON’T FORGET this step!

I selected a dirty spray paint brush from my collection of free brushes. (Don’t have a spray paint brush? I got mine from Brusheezy.) If you look closely, you’ll see that pretty mint green color I selected in the Foreground Color box, that I have the brush at its maximum Size of 2500 pixels and the Opacity is 100%. By doing this part of the technique on its own layer, I can later adjust both the size of the brush and the opacity later. I can also move it around!

To keep the patches of spray paint from all looking exactly alike, I used the Brush Settings menu to change the angle of the brush. It’s also possible to adjust the roundness of the brush in this menu, but I kept it round.

Once I’d applied some paint over top of each of my 6 snowflakes, I needed to Select the snowflake shapes ON the paint layer. To do that, I made sure the paint layer was the active one in the Layers panel, then I clicked on the snowflake layer thumbnail.

That gave me those delightful little marching ants, as shown in the screenshot below.

The final step to get that amazing reverse stencil look is to delete the areas inside the marching-ant boundaries. CTRL/CMD>X and it’s done. When I played with this using a more solid snowflake png, the difference was much more obvious, but I really liked the way this looked so I kept going. That’s the whole technique, in just a few easy steps.

Now, if you have a few more minutes, I want to give you some tips on making sure the effect is as close to perfect as you can make it. I turned the visibility of my template layers back on so I could see where the spray paint actually goes – where it will be in the finished layout. It wasn’t quite where I wanted it to be – behind the cluster – so I moved the whole layer down a bit using the Move tool.

That created a little problem. Because my sprays went over the edge of the background paper at the top, I now had a pretty sharp line where the paint stopped. And that defeated the purpose! So I used the same spray brush at a much smaller size, and the Eraser tool to soften that edge.

Then I went ahead and finished my layout. You can see the subtle stenciled snowflakes quite easily now, and if you look really closely at the gallery image I’ve linked, you might be able to see that I’ve also used every one of those acrylic snowflakes again in their unaltered form.

Some of you might remember that I told you I always save a PSD form of my layouts until I’m SURE I’m not going to change anything. Look at the screenshot below and you’ll see why! I substituted a piece of ric rac for two paper strips. But in my excitement at how awesome I thought my layout was, I forgot to delete one of the dark brown paper place markers. You can see it, about halfway down on the left side. I didn’t notice it, or the fact that I’d forgotten to shadow the ric rac layers, until I’d posted to the Gallery, the Challenge thread, my Cookie Jar and to the GS Facebook page. Urk!! All was not lost… I fixed it and edited my posts so everyone would think I’m perfect. 😀

I hope you liked this lesson; I’ll be looking for your reverse stencil layouts in the gallery. One more tutorial before the year ends. What shall it be??

Merry Christmas, חג חנוכה שמח (Chag urim sameach), Happy Kwanzaa, Meán Geimhridh Sona Duit… Happiest Holidays!

Getting More Mileage from Your Templates… Easily!

I know this is a ridiculously hectic time of year for everybody. And I also know that in a few short weeks all of us will have a plethora of new photos to scrap. So this quick little tut will show you how to make a template do double duty. Templates already help to streamline the process, and any time they can be modified to accomplish more than one purpose, it’s a bonus.

I had some very sweet photos of my daughter and youngest grandson that I was dying to make into a 2-page spread for the December Buffet challenge; I wanted the layouts to look similar but not identical, and I didn’t have a lot of time. So I found a template that would work really nicely for my photos in the lovely A Year in Review – December set from Krizstina of Tinci Designs, shown below. I’d already decided that Winter Whimsies from the amazing Katie  – Just So Scrappy – would be perfect with my photos.

I knew I wanted to have the backgrounds identical to each other, in terms of papers used. So I turned off all the layers but the main paper blocks. A quick way to do that is to run your cursor over the eyeballs and up the column in the Layers panel while holding down the left mouse button. That’ll turn off every layer you run the mouse over.

If you look where the arrows are pointing you can see the eyeballs have been closed. I clipped my papers to each of the template’s main paper layers and this is what it looked like. Kinda blah, I know, but it gets better!

I’ve mentioned before that the symbols used by designers of templates aren’t RULES. They’re suggestions. You can substitute any manner of things for the flowers (for example), you can move them around if you find they’re covering up your photos in the wrong places, you can duplicate them or delete them and play with the any way you want. In a lesson down the road I’ll show you how to combine two templates into one smashingly unique layout. But back to the lesson at hand. I’ve turned on all the layers that were invisible before. This is an important step, because I want to know where all the place holders are later, when I use the copy of this layout I’m going to make in a second.

I took the steps shown below (oh, you know that’s a lie, I used keyboard shortcuts), and I saved the PSD file with the papers added in. I renamed the file so it wouldn’t overwrite the original template. I might want to use it again some day. For those of you dying to learn keyboard shortcuts, they’re actually right there in plain sight. CTRL/CMD>Shift>S is the quick way of getting to the Save As menu.

I’m going to share a little workflow tip with you now. I always make a folder for each of my layouts. Then I COPY the items I want to use into the folder so they’re all together and I can see how they’re going to look. When I’m ready to work on the layout, I open the folder and select all the items in it into PSE. Then when I’m all finished, I save the final layout in that folder both as a PSD file and a JPEG. When I’m positive I won’t need to make any changes (spelling, layers I forgot to shadow, weird little not-quite-right things I notice when I post to the gallery, you know what I mean) I can delete the rest of the things in the folder (BECAUSE THEY’RE COPIES) to save memory. That’s what I’ve shown you below.

In this step, I selected the folder I was saving to (1.) then renamed the file so I’d know which one was which (2.) and made sure it was still in PSD format so it could be changed later (3.)

Here’s my first finished layout. (The gray border is the background of my workspace in PSE, not part of the layout.)

After I saved that layout as I explained above – with the layout name instead of the working file name! – I opened up the working template again. As I said, I wanted it to match the first one, but look different. I followed the steps shown below to flip the whole template horizontally so the paper strips would line up perfectly.

Then I went ahead and moved some things around a bit, eliminated one of the photos, used a tag instead of another of the photos, enlarged the one that was left, changed some of the elements I used and ended up with this!

Here are the two layouts side-by-side, just the way they’ll be in Aaron’s birthday album of his first year in pictures.

There you go… short, sweet and to the point. Have a great week… I’ll be thinking up something new to share with you next week.

For all you former paper scrappers: INKED EDGES!

After last week, I hope there are still people willing to read my tuts. I know it was a bit of a beast, but I’m sure somebody out there is happy to give it a whirl.

Recently I was making some greeting cards and reverted to my paper-scrapping days. I LOVE inked edges on various parts of my cards and I did them on many of my paper layouts too. While I was getting dirty it occurred to me there might be a digiscrapping tutorial in there somewhere. I’ve done inked edges on some of my digi layouts and have an easy way to do them so now I’m going to share that with you. And as promised last week, this is a short snapper of a tut.

This handy tip will work on just about any paper item you can think of, with some slight variations. The trick is to work on a separate layer and on a larger-than-usual canvas. I used a template from Aprilisa’s Ready for the Weekend template pack #1 for this tutorial layout since a template makes things simple to demonstrate. So let’s get going.

I opened my template on my work space. Then I enlarged the canvas size it’s sitting on to 13×13 inches. This part is important, otherwise all you’ll have is a mess. I use a keyboard shortcut (I know, shocking, right?) for this – CTRL/CMD>Alt>C but you might like to do it the hard way. Click on the Image tab, Resize and Canvas Size. (See the keyboard shortcut there?)

This menu will pop up. Choose something larger than 12×12 inches.

Now you should have a nice transparent border all around your template.

The next step is to turn off the visibility for all the layers except the background layer, where we’re going to start. There’s a quick and easy way to do this too. Just hold down the left click button while you drag your cursor over the little eyeballs.

Of course, if you’re just inking the edges on a tag or a journal card, you can skip this step. Just make sure you have a good transparent border all around your item.

*****Before going any further, open a new blank layer just above the layer you’re working on. All you have to do is click on the icon that looks like a piece of paper with a folded corner, above the Layers panel. This is another VITAL step.*****

Next, select a brush that has a bit of scatter, but not too much. You can use a default brush that came with your software, or you can pick up some cool free ones online from places like Brusheezy.com. I like to use a spray paint brush. And we old-school paper scrappers typically use a brown ink to grunge up our stuff, so I’ve got a brown in the foreground of my Color Picker. Just below the Brush pop-up menu is the adjustment panel for your brushes. Adjust the size so your brush isn’t huge, but is big enough to make the job easy. I usually go with about 400 pixels. You see the default settings for this particular brush set in the screenshot.

Now all you have to do is paint around the edges. Have your brush cursor just off the edge of the paper and go all around the whole piece of paper. You can stop-and-go or do it all as a smooth dragging movement.

When you’ve got the whole edge inked you’re going to clip the brush layer to your paper. Right click on the brush layer in the Layers panel then choose Create Clipping Mask. Or you can do what I do, CTRL/CMD>G.

Magic! But there’s more!!

That inked edge is a tad bit dark, don’t you think? So let’s pull the opacity of that layer down to something more appealing. Like maybe about… oh… 29%. And now it’s a nice, grungy but understated inked edge.

The final step is to merge the layers. Select the background paper and brush layers, then right click and choose Merge Layers. Or… do like Jan does and go CTRL/CMD>E and you’re done.

I inked the edges of most of the papers I used for my layout for the November Buffet Challenge. I used parts of several kits: Aprilisa’s Pumpkin Everything Krafties, Connie Prince’s My Journey extra papers, Keley Designs’ Thankful for You stickers and Mandy King’s Family Tradition elements. And, of course, Aprilisa’s template.

I hope you’re enjoying your December and aren’t stressing too much about all the things you think you have to do. See you all next week!

Word Art Wizardry

Are you ready for a really long tutorial?? There are a lot of screenshots in this one, but only so I can be sure you’ve got the steps down.

If you’re like me, you probably have a good sized collection of word art in your stash. And, if you’re anything like me, you want to make it look unique to you, even though using it as is would be super simple. Let me show you a pretty easy and relatively quick way to customize and jazz up some word art. I chose this one from Jennifer Arbon of Word Art World, who guested at GingerScraps earlier this year. I wanted to use different colours for different sections of it, so I decided how many colours I was going to use – 3, then I made that many copies of the word art.

While I was working through my usual process, I discovered an even better way of doing things, which I’ll share with you later, but to start off, I wanted to isolate the paint smears, splatters and hand prints. So I selected the bottom layer in the Layers panel and a hard eraser brush. I turned the visibility of the layers I wasn’t working with off so I could see what I was doing. Then I started erasing. (You might note that I’m not using a layer mask here. I could have, but because I’m working on a copied layer, I didn’t worry about going too far or not far enough.)

After about 10 minutes of work, I had what I wanted. I only took me that long because of the complexity of the areas I wanted to keep.

Then I moved on to the next layer. I turned the first layer’s visibility off (closed the eye) and the middle layer’s on. And this is when I had a major EUREKA moment. I was dreading having to find and erase all the little splashes of paint that I just knew were going to be hard to see until I applied a shadow or other style to it. So I thought… why not try selecting the image I have left on my bottom layer using the Layer Thumbnail and then deleting it. Just to see what happens. And it WORKED. Don’t remember how to do that? With the layer you want to change selected in the Layers panel, then CTRL/CMD>click on the layer thumbnail – the box with the image in it.

If you look really closely at this screenshot, you can see the marching ants around the hand prints and the paint just under the “s”. See also that even though that layer is turned off, the software still selected what is on it. Now it’s just a matter of deleting or cutting out the stuff I don’t want on the layer. Keyboard shortcut is CTRL/CMD>X. Or if you prefer to go the long way, you can click on the Edit tab and select Cut from the drop-down menu.

Poof! The paint and handprints are history. Sort of.

From here it’s a lot easier, especially since my discovery worked so beautifully. To remove HANDS-ON from the middle layer, I used the Marquee tool. It’s the rectangle symbol in the Tools panel; I clicked and dragged out a rectangle that encompassed everything I wanted to remove without including any part of the word FUN.

Simple CTRL/CMD>X and bye-bye!

Then I clicked on the Layer thumbnail for the FUN layer. Voilà the marching ants.

Here you can see the top two layers visible, with the marching ants around the word FUN. Remember that the top layer is the entire word art, because I haven’t removed anything from it yet.

After I deleted the word FUN I could still see an outline.

A couple of minutes with a light touch on the eraser and it was gone.

I still had to remove the paint and handprints so I selected the Layer thumbnail again (CTRL/CMD>click inside the image box) and deleted the area now outlined with marching ants. (CTRL/CMD>X or Edit>Cut)

So now I have the three separate areas of the word art on different layers and I’m ready to colour!

If you’ve never worked with Adjustment Layers, prepare to be amazed! I worked from the bottom up in the same way I would have if I was putting together a word art with paper items and paint. Click on the Layer tab, then select New Fill Layer from the drop-down and Solid Color from the fly-out.

A new pop-up menu will appear as shown below.

Once you’ve clicked on OK, the Color Picker opens. I want the messy part to look like beets or cranberry sauce, so I pulled the colour I wanted from my photo. (Not shown.)

After I clicked OK, it looked like this. Not quite what I was looking for. I knew I was going to have to copy the layer and stack it to bring the colour out more. But first I had to Simplify the layer. What that does is make the colour layer and the word art layer a single object.

A right click on the colour layer brings up this menu.

Then I made 3 more copies of that first paint-handprints layer one on top of the other. See how much darker the red is now? Looks a lot like beet juice!

I followed the same process for the FUN layer, only I used green.

For the HANDS-ON layer I wanted to use a dark navy colour so I opened up one of the alphas I was using for my title and with the Eyedropper (Color Picker) tool I chose a spot on the letter that was nice and dark.

Then I went on to do the same steps as before.

But when I was done, there wasn’t as much definition for the words as I wanted. So I went ll the way back to my first tutorial and turned the words into stickers. To do that, I started with the HANDS-ON layer and clicked on the Edit tab. Then I selected Stroke from the options.

There are some choices to make in this menu. I wanted the white outline to be fairly thin, just barely there, so I went with 3 pixels. I wanted it to follow the contours of the letters but not cover up much of the actual letter so I went with Center. That puts the very center of the stroke on the edge of the object to be outlined, some of it inside and some of it outside. If you put the stroke inside the edges of the item you might hide most of the colour and lose some details. If you go outside there might be some areas that don’t look nice and smoothly curved. It’ll really depend on your own preferences when you’re doing it as to which location you choose. The beauty of digiscrapping is that nothing is ever final. You can try it each way and see how it looks, then if you don’t like it, CTRL/CMD>Z and it’s gone. (If you’re undoing several changes and find you’ve undone something you didn’t want to undo, you can undo the undo by clicking CTRL/CMD>Y.)

This is how the stroke looked on that blue HANDS-ON layer. I was happy with it so I used the same process and settings on the FUN layer too.

Now it’s time to make the word art into a single layer so when you move it onto your layout, it all goes together. Select all the layers and CTRL/CMD>E will merge them together. Or you can right click with all three layers selected and choose Merge Layers from the pop-up.

This is what the finished product looks like on my layout. It’s the layout I did for the second November Template Challenge. The template was generously provided by Krisztina of Tinci Designs. If you’re not playing along with the GingerScraps challenges, you don’t know what you’re missing!

Whew, what a marathon! Do you feel like you’ve been through the wringer? You know I’ll be looking for word art wizardry in the Gallery, and I know you won’t let me down!

Next week the lesson will be much shorter, sweeter and simpler, I promise.

Titles with STYLE(s)

Today we’re going to play with titles again. There are so many ways to make our titles amazing and eye-catching. Using styles is one of those ways. Now some of you may be scratching your heads and asking me, “What the heck are you talking about?” and others might be thinking, “I know what they are but I don’t know how to use them.” That’s all about to change!

Styles are little scripts that tell PSE what to do to alter an object. They can be simple drop shadows, they can be glittery, they can be glossy and everything in between. Katie, the brains and talent behind Just So Scrappy and Ooh La La Scraps, creates a bundle of styles that coordinate with each of her brilliant kits; I’ll be using some of them in my example today. Katie’s bundles usually include styles that can make your object look like acrylic gel, cardboard or felt, cardstock, chipboard, chrome (I KNOW, right!!), dots, embossed, glitter, plaid, stars, stripes or wood. The possibilities are endless!

Since we’re talking about titles and using styles, obviously I’m not going to use the alpha that comes with the kit I used for my layout. I’m going to use a font. I know what look I’m going for so choosing the right font is very important. My layout, for the November Mix It Up Mystery Challenge revolves around my annual fruit cake ritual so I want my title to look like candied fruit, or hard candy. That means my font has to be a solid, hefty, rounded one. If you’re like me you probably have hundreds of fonts and dread having to search for the perfect one. That’s where Wordmark It comes in. It’s a website that shows you what your text will look like in every font you have on your computer, and it only takes a couple of minutes. The image below shows you what the screen looks like. I browsed through the exemplars and decided a font called Glasoor FF 4F Black would work beautifully. (Where do they get these names from?)

As I always do, I created my title on its own workspace. I wanted each of the letters in my title to be a different colour so I knew I’d have to put each letter on its own layer. This step isn’t crucial, but it helps to keep things organized. I pulled a horizontal guideline down to align my text on, and then a second one because I planned to put each word on a separate line. Don’t know how to pull a guideline down? I have the rulers visible on my workspace at all times but you don’t need it there to do this. Just put your cursor right up the very top of the dark gray workspace and then click-and-drag the line to where you want it. You can see mine in the image below, the thin turquoise lines. I put the text cursor on the line and started building. I used a 72 point size, which is big enough to see and manipulate easily.

It doesn’t matter what colour you use for the text at this stage. You’re going to cover it up with a style later. While I was playing with the base, I selected all 4 letters in “cake” and shifted them as a group, which is shown below.

Then I selected the style set I wanted to use. Don’t know how to load styles? If you’re using PSE 10 or higher, it’s simple. When you open the Style panel using the Effects menu, at the right upper corner of the panel is a little icon that looks like several little horizontal lines with a tiny triangle just to the left of them. If you click on that, the following menu pops up. Click on Load Styles then find the folder you have your styles in. Then select the style you want to use and you’re in business.

Once I’d done all that, I selected the acrylic gel style from Just So Scrappy’s Up on the Housetop bundle. (pssst… it’s on sale for $5 right now!) I applied a different colour style to each letter. It would have been more work to do it to each individual letter to select each one from a single layer and apply them, but not impossible. I’m all about working smart, not hard!

When I had the letters all styled up, I decided I didn’t like both words ending with red, so I right-clicked on the layers for the “k” and the “e” and selected Clear Layer Style. Then I swapped the red and brown around.

Here’s another advantage to having each letter on its own layer. Now I was able to move them around a little to make the title look more interesting.

Once I’d gotten all of that done, I wanted to get rid of the guides. So I clicked on the View tab and unselected Guides from the drop-down menu. (Did anybody notice I also had a vertical guide in this screenshot? I had thought to line up the two words, but didn’t like how it looked.)

When I was happy with how it looked. I selected all the layers (keyboard shortcut: click on the top layer, hold down the Shift key and click on the bottom layer) then merged them onto a single layer. (CTRL/CMD+E) I thought it looked pretty good, but was afraid it was going to get lost on my layout. So I decided to put a paper outline around it.

I dragged a paper onto my workspace, making sure it was underneath my title, then with my paper layer still the active layer, I held down the CTRL/CMD key and clicked once on the thumbnail for the layer with the title on it. That put some marching ants around the letters, as you can sort of see below. Then I clicked on the Select tab, chose Modify and Expand from the drop-down and fly-out menus. (You might remember that from a previous tutorial, if you’re a faithful reader.)

I wanted the paper border to be visible, but not ridiculously huge so I typed 10 into the Expand by:_ pixels box. That shifted the marching ants away from the edges of the letters.

Then all I had to do was cut the rest of the paper away. To do that I first inverted the selection by clicking CTRL/CMD+X (the long way: right-click anywhere on the workspace and choose Invert Selection. Then go to the Edit tab, choose Cut.)

But I still wasn’t happy with it. I knew I needed to shadow the letters so they’d look more like candy. And I’d layered them on top of a piece of paper so there was a need for some definition. Then I decided to try a Bevel, which looked quite odd until I dragged the size down to 0. Then I liked it. I had to adjust the Lighting Angle because I was using a template (rotated and tweaked a bit) and wanted the shadows to agree with each other. That step isn’t shown, but it was discussed in last week’s tutorial on drop shadows.

One last thing I had to do before I moved my title onto my layout was to merge the layers so it would move as a single object. Remember how to do that? Select all the layers then click CTRL/CMD+E. Once I’d put it onto my layout I resized it and moved it around a bit, and was done!

That’s all for this week. Next week I’ll have some other tips, tricks and techniques for you. Keep your eyes open!

Text Talk – LETTERPRESS!

Hey, all you Gingerscrappers! It’s Tuesday again and time for another little lesson to take your layouts up a notch. Glee posted a comment on one of my layouts in the gallery and she mentioned that my text looked like letterpress. She’s got a great eye… it’s the digital equivalent and it’s super-simple to do. I knew I was going to need a quick topic for this week because of the hectic, crazy schedule I’ve had at my real job and her comment just fit the bill perfectly. So let me show you how to turn text into letterpress.

For those who aren’t sure what that means, it’s how print looks when it’s typed with an old-fashioned manual typewriter on soft paper. It’s indented and the edges appear quite crisp. Maybe you’re wondering why you’d want to create this effect. Well, it makes your journaling more visible. It has some shadowing and texture, it adds depth and detail to your text and catches attention. It’s something people who were paper scrappers will love to see in the gallery. And perhaps most importantly, it GROUNDS your text. Text should never “float”… it can’t float when we paper scrap, and it must not when we do it digitally. For this reason, your text layers should be on the layer immediately above the paper or tag or label or whatever you’re applying it to, otherwise it’s going to look odd. And we don’t want that!

I like to use this technique on typewriter fonts like Typical Typewriter (used in the example), F25 Executive, Underwood 5 and similar fonts. But it also looks great with handwriting fonts, especially if you use an inky blue – it looks like you’ve scribbled it down with a ball-point pen. I know you’re going to try this!

Once you’ve typed out what you want to transform, you’re going to click on the Styles tab and select Bevels.

As you roll your mouse over the little thumbnails a label with the type of effect the style will create will pop up. You want to select Simple Emboss.

This is what it looks like. Downright horrible!! This is where the magic happens…

Double-click on the fx icon on your text layer. This box will open up. You want to grab the slider for Size and drag it to the left.

The default is 21 pixels. I like to go down to about 5 or 6. But you can go all the way to 0 and it will still alter your text visibly.

Then click on the box next to Down and look! It’s now “debossed” and looks dramatically different. That’s all there is to it!

I wanted to have the labels on all three of the tabs on my layout looking alike, so once I had my text typed onto the appropriate layers, I right-clicked on the layer where I’d already “pressed” the text and selected Copy Layer Style as shown.

Then I selected my new text layers and right-clicked on them. Then I selected Paste Layer Style and all my tabs looked alike.

This handy technique literally takes only seconds once you’ve done it a few times. What are YOU going to use it for?

The layout I’ve screenshotted for this tut was created with the Daily Download kit Just Be from Laurie’s Scraps and Designs. There are links posted here on the blog every day that let you pick up the pieces of the kit. If you’ve missed the first half of the month, the full kit will be available for sale in December. It’s got a wonderful colour palette and I enjoyed playing with it. Laurie is in the Designer Spotlight this month and is hosting the Designer Spotlight Challenge. Check it out!

Til next week, GSers!

Shadow Basics

Gingerscrapper Marie Williams responded to my request for topics with an interest in learning more about shadows, particularly with clusters. Shadowing is a very complex topic so we’re going to look at some basics today.

When we scrap our memories with digital supplies everything is completely flat, two-dimensional… and it looks funny. Using drop shadows makes everything more realistic and attractive. Let’s talk about shadows a little bit before we look at how to make them look good. The first thing we should talk about is light and the source of the light. There are usually multiple light sources shining on an object, and there may be shadows in several directions but unless the light is directly above and perpendicular to an object, there will be one dominant light source/shadow combo. In Photoshop Elements, the default angle of light for the drop shadow styles bundled in the software is 120° – coming from the upper left corner – but that can be changed to suit your purposes. The default colour of the integrated drop shadows is solid black… and about as UNnatural as you can get. But that too can be changed to suit your purposes. Many digiscrappers like to use a dark brown shadow for their layouts, which makes a natural-looking shadow and a pleasing outcome. So let’s play with the shadows that come with the software and see how to manipulate them.

Flat and uninspiring. That’s how these beads from Ooh La La Scraps’ Creepy kit look against one of the papers from the same kit.

When thinking about shadows, you not only have to consider where the light is coming from but also how much light will pass UNDER an object and how far the shadow will spread. Anything that touches the surface it’s sitting on will cast a sharper, darker shadow than something that floats over it. The more contact an object makes with the surface under it, the darker the shadow will be. So hard objects like beads, buttons, frames, metal pieces like paper clips and brads need a more substantial shadow than a flower or a butterfly. Also, the thinner an object – like paper for example, the narrower and sharper the shadow.

The Drop Shadow menu is found under the Styles tab in the Effects panel. Shown below is the meager selection of shadow choices. For the beads in the screenshot, I selected the “Low” shadow style and double-clicked on it to shadow my beads. (If you’re someone who likes to take extra time at a task, you can right click on the style swatch and then select Apply to Document.)

The resulting shadow was quite sharp and harsh, so I double-clicked on the little fx on the Layers panel, which opened up this menu. I pulled the sliders until I liked the way the shadow looked. In another set of screenshots I’ll show you the difference between the stock shadow and one that’s been tweaked. Notice that there’s an indicator for the Lighting Angle. The labels for the sliders are a little confusing, so I’m going to explain how they work. The Size slider will alter the sharpness of the edge on your shadow. The Distance slider controls the width of the shadow and the Opacity slider is pretty self-explanatory. Having said that, remember you’re going for natural and appealing so you’ll probably want to decrease the opacity from the default setting of 75%; how much will depend on what you’re shadowing. There’s also a black box there that, when you click on it, opens up the colour picker. More about that later.

Flowers are much more complex than beads so let’s do one of them now. The style that is highlighted in the screenshot is the same one I used for the beads, but the one with the label Soft Edge is the one I used. Remember what I said about the amount of light that can pass UNDER an object. Flower petals allow a lot more light under them than beads do, so the shadow will be softer and wider.

Below is the way the shadow looks without any adjustments. It looks okay, but I think it can look better. What do you think?

It’s bigger, it’s farther away and it’s not as dark here, but it looks much more natural.

Brads aren’t a lot different from beads and buttons, but they usually have very sharp edges, so their shadows need to be a bit sharper. They’re also hard and dense, so they need a darker shadow.

The unadjusted shadow, using the Hard Edge style which should be appropriate for a hard, sharp object like this, is pretty harsh. See where the sliders are? Size is at 0, Distance at 20 and Opacity at 75%. And it’s kinda ugly.

So I pulled the sliders a bit, Size to 18, left the Distance at 20 and decreased Opacity to 65%. But I also thought I’d play with the colour of the shadow a little. So I looked at the gray paper in the background and selected a paler greenish-gray for the shadow.

The change shows up below. See how the shadow is a little softer and looks so much better? The difference in colour of the shadow is very subtle and isn’t really visible in the screenshot. But this is an important step to know, because if your background paper is already black, how are your shadows going to show up? Simple… change the shadow colour.

Buttons are very similar to brads, in the sense that they’re hard and most of the back is in contact with the paper. But this one has a slight curve at the edge, so there will be a bit more light getting under there. Unadjusted Hard Edge shadow shown below.

Size is now 32, Distance is still 20 and Opacity is 63%. Notice anything else? YES!! I changed the Lighting Angle to 60°. Good eye! (That’s the main secret here… watch what happens to your shadows as you move the sliders and when it looks right, you’ll know it.)

Okay, let’s talk about string, twine, curly ribbon, yarn, wire… those things that are skinny and flexible. Their shadows will be a little different. Because there’s not going to be a lot of it that is in direct contact with the background, their shadows are going to need to be a bit further away and a lot softer. I selected the Soft Edge style, which looks okay, but it can be a lot better. (Where have I heard that before?)

I thought the shadow was a little TOO soft, so I pulled the Size slider to the left a touch – to 32 from 42, the Distance slider to the right a touch to 42 from 20 and the Opacity slider to the left to 46% from the default 75%. Better!

Let’s go back to flowers again for a second. Some flowers are much denser than others. This one has several more layers of petals than the first one I showed you, so it’s going to cast a more substantial shadow. It’s also flatter, so there will be less light getting under it and the shadow won’t be as spready.

I decreased the Size a bit, increased the Distance a bit and decreased the Opacity a bit.

Stitches are really tricky! Depending on what kind of thread used they can be fine or hefty, narrow or thick. The also are close to the surface they’re applied to, so the shadow will be… narrow, fairly sharp and fairly dark. I selected the Soft Edge style.

Um… no. Let’s tweak a bit.

You can see what adjustments I made. And how much better it looks!

I know you’re all wondering, “But you haven’t said anything about paper, except in passing”. So think about paper. It’s thin – but can be thicker (cardstock). It usually is quite close to the surface it’s sitting on. (Lifting paper corners digitally is a lesson for another day.) And it has a sharp edge. (Paper cuts anyone?) I used the Low style since it is paper I’m shadowing and it is close to the paper under it. I wanted to show you a dialog box you’ll sometimes see if you use these integrated shadows on something narrow (like the stitches) so I’m showing you a paper border.

You can ignore that! Click on OK and carry on. Your shadow will still show up just fine. You can leave it as is, or tweak it a bit so the shadow is a little tighter. Defaults are 20, 20 and 75%.

And then we should look at stickers. My very first tutorial for GS taught you how to make stickers with fonts, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you how to get a realistic shadow on your stickers. Stickers sit VERY close to the background they’re attached to. There will be a shadow, but it will be narrow, sharp and not particularly dark because of the thinness of the paper they’re on. I went with the Hard Edge style.

Then I shrunk it down to a teeny, tiny skinny shadow. Because stickers don’t float!

Now let’s put it all together and make a cluster. Start dropping your shadows on the items closest to the paper and work your way up, thinking about how much of the object is touching your layout, the object’s density, where the light is coming from and what’s underneath it.

I decided the tag is made of cardstock, so it’s got a bit heavier shadow than plain paper.

The leaves are touching but curved, so they get a bigger, softer shadow.

The white flower is flat and stiff, but is on top of the leaves, so it gets a slightly sharp but also slightly wider shadow. The yellow flower is a bit fluffier and is on top of the other three items so it needs a more diffuse shadow. Notice the colour of the shadows cast by the top-most layer of petals… they’re not black but a dark orange. Try and picture those in black. Ugh!

And finally, the string bow is on top of everything, and is thin and floppy. So it needs a shadow that’s farther away but still visible. (A lesson on warping shadows for things like this bow is on my list for a tutorial down the road.) And there we are! A cluster with natural-looking drop shadows.

WHEW! That was a long-winded lesson!! I hope you’re still following along. After all that, I’ll tell you a secret. I use a set of shadow styles I bought from a designer. Because I’m into instant gratification… and I’m lazy! It’s just so much easier and quicker to use a preset – double-click and you’re done. But there are times when I still play with those presets because I want a different look. The layout I created with the items in this tut is in the gallery. See if you can pick out where I’ve tweaked things. There are a few, but they’re not obvious… Then go practice, practice, practice! Your eye will get better and better and soon your shadows will be the envy of the digi-world.

(PS… GS doesn’t have a designer who has shadow presets in her store. But I know where you can find them…)