A 3D Title with Punch!

Thanks again to Ellen (gmae) we have another quick technique that has a great deal of appeal. Magical Scraps Galore has a a travel kit with some great title word art in it, called Destinations: Road Trip. The title Ellen particularly liked is the Road Trip one, but she wanted to use a different title in the same style. She messaged me that she tried to get this figured out on her own and eventually succeeded, but she knew there had to be a better way than stumbling around experimenting and undoing for hours. After all, that’s what I’m here for. 🙂 After a little thought and (not very much) experimentation, I can tell you, this does the trick and it’s not a ton of work. So let’s get started!

For this little demo I’m using a pretty striped yellow alpha from the GingerBread Ladies‘ Sunny Days collab. You can absolutely use a font if you choose, but each individual letter will need to be on its own layer. I opened up a 12×12 document on my workspace.

The first step is to create a elliptical shape to give the lower curve to the title. I pulled out a Custom Shape ellipse as shown. Whatever colour you have in your foreground is fine; I just had white already there. The ellipse should be slim and long, a sort of cigar-shape.

Remember, Custom Shapes are Smart Objects, meaning the pixels in it are locked and there’s not much you can do with them as is. I’ll be manipulating this shape so I right-clicked on the layer and hit Simplify Layer.

I want a Copy of the ellipse, which can be achieved in two ways: right-click on the layer and hit Duplicate Layer (then click OK on the pop-up menu), or simply by CTRL/CMD>J.

I enlarged the second ellipse quite a lot. My title only has 6 letters, but it’s still going to need some room.

I opened up a new blank layer on top of the larger ellipse by clicking on the sheet-of-paper icon at the top left of the layers panel, then I CTRL/CMD>clicked on the ellipse’s layer thumbnail (that little picture at the left side of the layer in the layers panel) to Select the edge of the ellipse. Boom Marching ants.

With the BLANK layer active and a contrasting colour in the foreground, I hit Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection.

This Stroke can go wherever. I just had Inside already selected and it’s not important for this step. I want the Stroke to be easily seen so I have black and 10 pixels set.

Now that I have a visible outline of the large ellipse on its own layer, the larger ellipse has served its purpose and can be Deleted. Right-click>Delete Layer or simply CTRL/CMD>D.

These two layers will be the guide for positioning my letters. They will sit on the edge of the smaller ellipse and stretch to touch the edge of the larger ellipse. To get that flare at the end of the title, the smaller solid ellipse needs a tilt.

After I looked at the gap for a minute or so, I decided the flare needed some more adjustment so I tilted the larger ellipse a bit in the opposite direction.

I have my guides in place, so now I can add my letters. For this step I’m just going to put them all on the canvas and position them so the bottoms are touching the solid, smaller ellipse.

As I’m placing them into the gap, I’m Resizing so the top is touching the edge of the larger ellipse.

Once all the letters were inside the gap, I took a long look at them. I could just stop here and have an interesting and eye-catching title.

If you’re still with me, I’m now going to Image>Transform>Distort each letter so that they more closely follow the contours of my guides.

All I’ve done is Move the corners of the Bounding Box so that they’re touching the edges of each ellipse. You can see that the sides of the Bounding Box have remained perpendicular to the bottom of the page.

To review: Image>Transform>Distort…

then move the corners of the Bounding Box so they touch the edges of the ellipses. Don’t change the orientation of the letter.

Here you can see what I mean about the length of your title related to the size of your ellipses. After all the letters have been placed, the ellipse layers can be deleted.

Now onward to getting that 3D look! Add a blank layer UNDER the first letter. You can start with it on top by clicking on the sheet-of-paper, and then move it down. Or you can hold down the CTRL/CMD key and click on the sheet-of-paper and it’s just go there by itself. With the BLANK layer active, CTRL/CMD>click on the first letter’s layer thumbnail to Select the edge.

Next I’m going to enlarge the selected area: Select>Modify>Expand… and my BLANK layer is still the active layer.

The pop-up menu is asking how much to Expand my Selection. 10 pixels is about right.

And there it is. See how the marching ants have moved away from the letter’s edge? Verifying… on the BLANK layer, now I’ll Fill that selected area using pure white and the Paint Bucket tool.

The real 3D look comes from adding shadows to each layer. I used some shadow styles from Karen Schulz. You can find them here.

Let’s review again. Open a new blank layer under the next letter. CTRL/CMD>click on the layer thumbnail for the next letter to Select the edge. Select>Modify>Expand the Selection by 10 pixels. Fill the new Selection with white on the BLANK layer.

This 10 pixel setting will be saved until you change it, or exit from the software, although that doesn’t always reset it to the default. You can keep the Paint Bucket tool active as you work through the letters, which really saves time.

When all the letters have been shadowed, my title is essentially done.

I’ll make sure when I move the letters that I’ve got both layers active, otherwise I’ll be messing it up. The nice part about using a shadow Style is that any changes I make to the layers now will be followed by the Style. That’s to say, the lighting angle, size and opacity will stay the same. (Did you notice I missed a couple of my layers when I was Shadowing? I went back and Copied the Style onto those layers.)

If there are overlapping letters, I’ll shift them a bit so there’s a space between each. There was an overlap at the R and the I, so I’ve “kerned” them.

When I was happy with the way my title looked, I Activated all the layers so I could Merge them into a single layer to make using the title easier. Merging can be done either by right-clicking on one of the Active layers and hitting Merge Layers, or by CTRL/CMD>E.

And it’s done.

Is that what you were looking for, Ellen?

Here is the PDF version of this tutorial : https://bit.ly/3sVF93i

I Love a Curvy Border

(Bold, coloured text indicates I’ve linked that text to either a designer’s store or a specific kit/collection.)

I’m so glad to know that I’m not the only one with a huge pile of old scrapbooking magazines, and that I’m also not the only one to go through them looking for ways to translate what they hold into a digital version. Ellen (gmae) messaged me about a scrapbooking mag she had that was dated sometime in 2007, a Better Homes and Gardens “Ultimate Guide to Digital Scrapbooking” with step-by-step instructions. The instructions were based on Photoshop Elements 4.0… should be a piece of cake, right? WRONG! I remember trying to follow some of those magazine instructions and being completely lost. Ellen tried to follow the steps for creating a curved clipping mask, like the sort some of our amazing designers sometimes include in their collections, but she couldn’t get past the second step and she asked for help. So I rolled up my sleeves and gave the instructions a spin. And got hung up. At the second step. They totally didn’t make sense. So today, I’m going to show you how to make a curved paper border for your layouts step by step and anybody will be able to follow the instructions!

I think the easiest way to make this work well for you, I recommend opening a canvas on your workspace in the same size as your scrapbook layouts. I always do 12×12, but I know lots of people like the 8 1/2×11 format so you do you. then, using the Rectangle Marquee tool pull out a skinny vertical rectangle as shown.

The next step is to fill the Selection (your skinny rectangle) with a solid colour.

The magazine said to use Edit>Fill Selection and white at 100% opacity so I’ll show you that method. Using the Paint Bucket would work just as well.

And it’ll look like this when you’ve Filled it.

We’ve played around with Filters quite a bit recently and we’re going to do it again today. This time it’ll be Filter>Distort>Shear…

Here is what the default controls for this Filter look like. The two most important parts are the vertical line inside the upper box and the Preview image in the lower box.

To demonstrate what manipulating that vertical line does I simply grabbed the “handle” – that black dot at the very top of the line – and moved it over horizontally to the left. See what happens to the Preview? I love that they’ve put a grid there to make achieving symmetry easier.

To begin with the default setting only has the two “handles” at top and bottom. But you can create a new handle anywhere along that line. Here you can see I put one right in the centre and pulled it one block over to the right, and the stripe follows that curve.

I’ve created a sine wave in this image. The thing to note here is that when you make a deep curve like this, you’re not going to have perfectly parallel outer edges to your stripe, not that it matters much.

You can make your curves as plentiful and deep as you want.

Use the grid! It’s a great tool!

For my imaginary layout I’m going to put the curved border over along the left side so I moved my final camel-hump curved stripe over there. Only problem is I don’t want my background paper to show through at the edge so I’ll need to Fill those two voids.

Here’s where the Paint Bucket rushes to the rescue. All I need to do is dump some white paint into those holes and I’ll have a complete clipping mask.

To see the clipping mask in action I Clipped a paper from Ooh La La Scraps‘s I Heart You kit to my mask. (Sorry for the typo on the screenshot. JSS and OLL are the same person and I sometimes mix them up! BTW… the BUNDLE is on sale today for just $5.00!!!) The keyboard shortcut for clipping is CTRL/CMD>G for versions up to 14 and CTRL/CMD>ALT>G for versions 14 and up.

Because I wanted to see if I could make sense of the directions in the magazine, I followed their third step, which was to Duplicate the curved clipping mask layer to create a white border. I think a Stroke would do that with fewer steps, but okay. Let’s do it. Only problem? When I Duplicated the mask layer, the paper was “released” from the clipping mask! Now I have to redo clipping the paper to the mask again. So yeah, Stroke borders are the way to go!

I nudged the bottom curved mask layer over to the right so it moves out from under the paper and now there’s a white border.

For fun, I created another curved clipping mask, this time with four relatively symmetrical bumps on it. I clipped a paper from ADB Designs‘ The Storyteller kit to it. I think the two papers look good together.

Here’s a refresher on using Strokes to add a border. Edit>Stroke (Outline Selection) opens this menu. Decide how wide you want your Stroke and choose a colour for it. Make it 100% Opacity and you can put it wherever you like. I just went Outside because that’s what I used last. 😉

It’s a lot simpler to do a Stroke border. It looks pretty similar but uses fewer steps.

I made one more randomly bumpy border using the same steps and clipped another of ADB‘s papers to it. To give the appearance of paper layers, they need a drop shadow. Feel free to use a shadow Style if you like. I did mine using my tried-and-true method and now there’s some dimension to the border.

Some things I discovered: 1) Subsequent border masks have to be made on their own canvases. The Filter doesn’t understand what you want if there’s already one Shear filter present. 2) When you use the Distort>Shear… Filter and want to do the same technique on a new object, it will return you to whatever curves you used last, unless you close your Elements and reopen it – and who wants to do that?!! So prepare to be a little more challenged on those new curves. 3) To fill the area along the edge of your subsequent border masks, drag out a rectangle with your Rectangle Marquee tool that touches the free edge on the one side and sits inside the filled part of the stripe on the other. Then dump some paint into the rectangle with the Paint Bucket. Easy peasy.

Maybe you’ll be able to work this technique into a Survivor layout. That would be pretty sweet! See you next week.
Here is the link to this weeks PDF version: https://bit.ly/3vN9S4e

Making Use of the Circular “Stencil”

There are so many creative ways of using our digital scrapbooking supplies. Some are obvious, others aren’t. Today I’m going to show you some of the ways I used the paw print circular stencil we created in our last tutorial. These are only a few of the ideas and each of them can be improved upon with a little ingenuity.

This first one is a simple stencil effect using a brush. I thought this coloured pencil effect was interesting. There’s a similar demo set of brushes at Brusheezy.com. My background is a subtle gray chevron paper from Aimee Harrison‘s kit Bring Happiness (retired). I covered the stencil with the brush, stamping with it until the prints were completely covered, then cut away the overlap. To give it a bit more substance, I applied a stroke around the outside.

For this look, I reduced the size of the stencil so it filled one quarter of the paper. Then I filled it with a slightly darker shade of gray and changed the Blend Mode to Multiply and decreased the Opacity to 35%. I Copied (CTRL/CMD>J) the layer and redistributed the Copies so they filled each of the corners of the paper. This would be so cute on a newsprint background!

Here, all I’ve done is recolour the red print to the same dark gray as the rest of the prints then apply a Bevel style (Scalloped Edge) to the whole grouping.

This is another Bevel style, the Simple Sharp Outer. It creates a puffy-sticker look.

As you can see, I’ve applied a black Glitter Style from Just So Scrappy‘s Up on the Housetop set to this version.

To achieve this 3D glossy, sparkly look, I used a Glitter Gloss style from the same set as the plain glitter.

And for another look, I applied a Chipboard Style from the expanded set of Up on the Housetop‘s Styles.

Next, I used the stencil to create a cut-out. The papers are from Jumpstart Designs‘ Better Together (retired). A narrow shadow gives the illusion of space between the papers.

Reversing the script, I cut the paw prints out of the foreground paper and floated them over the cardstock.

The video this tutorial was inspired by used a shimmery texture paste to add dimension to the card the demonstrator was making. I went through my stash and found some gesso splatters also created by Sheri of Jumpstart Designs. You can find some of her gesso here. Don’t know what gesso is? It’s a mixture of paint (usually white) and a binder like chalk, gypsum, pigment or a combo of them. It’s thick and dried quite hard, with a lot of surface texture. I covered the stencil as much as possible, layering the gesso splatters on top of each other for even more depth. Then I gave each of the gesso layers a faint shadow, adding dimension to each. Once all the layers were shadowed, I cut away the overlap and this is what was left. It looks so organic!

To come even closer to the card in the video, I then applied a superfine white Glitter Style and changed the Blend Mode to Multiply with an Opacity of 60%.

These were the ideas that popped to mind. I’m sure you’ll have some ideas of your own. Steph (CalGirl) used the tutorial to create this beautiful layout. Rather than using a Custom Shape, she used a shamrock element from Karen Schulz‘s This Is Me March kit as her shape and clipped a paper to the stencil.

If you’d like detailed information on any of the techniques I’ve described please drop me a note in the Comments and I’ll show you how I got there.

See you next week!

Here is a link to the PDF version of this tutorial: https://bit.ly/38NSlyV