Anatomy of a Paper Stack

I don’t often give a lot of thought to the process of creating layouts, but a comment I received from becky_a on a layout I prepared for Katie of Just So Scrappy and Ooh La La Scraps with her August Buffet collection Live Life started me thinking about it. The two layouts I created for this collection were a little unusual for me, because I didn’t use templates for either of them. (I just couldn’t find one that I liked enough!) The layout becky_a commented on is this one:

… and this is what she said: “I love stacked papers like this and I have the most difficult time making them look right, lol. You make it look so easy.” I had to go look at the layout because I wasn’t sure what she meant! And then I thought maybe it might be worth talking about.

There are no rules for paper stacking. None. It’s pretty much a free-for-all! You can use whatever papers you like, mixing patterns and colours, shapes and angles to suit your whims. Let’s talk first about choosing papers. I’ve always struggled with boldly-patterned paper. They don’t often work with my style of scrapping, but using them in a paper stack like this is one way I can feel comfortable using them. As you can see, that black and white patterned paper is pretty bold! But it’s black and white, so it can work with pretty much anything. I like the paper closest to the photos and elements and largest by area to be relatively neutral, so it doesn’t draw the eye away from the meat-and-potatoes part of the layout. If I’m not planning on journaling ON that paper, patterns can work. I also like to mix up scale. A bold paper needs to be balanced by some smaller patterns or solids. But that doesn’t mean you CAN’T use another bold pattern, because you can resize to so it works well with  your other papers and what you’re doing with them. This is pretty much how I approach paper stacking all the time, whether or not I’m using a template; I like to contrast bright with neutral, bold with subtle, pattern with solid and to have some visible difference between them. But that’s how JAN stacks papers. I’ve seen lots of fabulous stacked-paper layouts where the scrapper has used a monochrome palette, mixed lots of patterns together or only used solids, so as I said, no rules!

Let’s look at this layout, also with the same collection and sans template. I use the Marquee tool and Inverse (Select>Inverse or CTRL/CMD>Shift>I) to cut my random shapes. To make concentric circles or ovals, I make a copy of the first oval then use the Select>Modify>Decrease path, typing in a pixel count to make the new oval smaller. Clip a paper to it and move on.

(My daughter and sister might not like to know I’ve called them both weird people. Or maybe they’d take it as a compliment. IDK!) When talking about colours, I often pull colour from my photographs. OR… I go for contrast. Here, the photo is pretty neutral, so the red, orange, purple and green from the kit all work together. You can see that I’ve mixed in some ovals and rectangles, some pennants and the square background papers. I’m going to tell you how I do those backgrounds, which might be news to those still learning digi-scrapping but is probably old hat to the more experienced in the group.

First step is to choose your papers. Then open a new 12×12 (or your favourite dimensions) canvas on your workspace. Decide which paper will be your main background, the one you want right under your elements and photo(s). Decide on the order of your other papers, keeping in mind the aesthetics of the layout as a whole. I usually use 3 papers for these stacked backgrounds because, as my dear friend Sandy Scott likes to remind me, 3 is an aesthetically pleasing number. You can drop them all onto your layout, turning visibility off to the topmost ones so you can see what you’re doing as you climb the stack. Or you can add them one at a time. Whatever suits your workflow. I’m showing them all piled on at once and in the screenshot after this one, you’ll see that the topmost paper is invisible.

To make a visually pleasing rotated stack, you’ll want to make the upper papers a bit smaller than the background paper. (Or not. Remember, no rules!) The easiest way to do it is to click on one of the corner “handles” on the bounding box, then either pull that handle in toward the centre, or take the quick-and-lazy route and type a number into that box I’ve shown you here. That keeps the papers centered one on top of the other. Just make sure you’ve got the Constrain Proportions box checked so it shrinks the paper in both horizontal and vertical planes.

Then rotate that second piece of paper. The Pivot point selected is the centre one – the default. The angle will be half of the percentage by which you’ve shrunk your paper, unless you want your corners to extend off the page. There are two spots where you can see the angle you’re rotating to, the black pop-up box and down in the Tool panel. I usually just eye-ball it.

I like to keep the papers in a rotated stack, other than the actual background, all the same size. It’s obviously not required, it’s just my OCD-ness. Shrinking the paper is done in exactly the same manner.

Then I tip the next/top paper in the opposite direction, to about the same angle. And that’s all there is to it! Shadow those babies up and you’re ready to move along.

The second example is even more straightforward.

When you’re doing this kind of stack, if you want a symmetrical border of the background paper visible, make sure your Pivot point is in the centre. It’s important! Typing a number into one of the dimension boxes – either one is fine, as long as you’re Constrained – is quick.

But if your Pivot point is in the lower right corner, for example, when you type in your number, this is what will happen. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because there are ways it can make your workflow more streamlined if you want to work from a corner out. (You can tell this screenshot was an after-thought. Sorry!)

Here, you can see what decreasing the paper size by 5% for the first one and 5% MORE for the second one will look like. You can use any amount you like; if you want a wider border of your very bottom paper, go with a bigger drop. If you want one border wider than another, choose a smaller or larger decrease. A nice solid paper with a narrow gap looks really good. Oh, and you CAN use a decimal in that box. You don’t have to go with whole numbers.

All of these tips can be applied to any stack of papers you might contemplate, either as part of a template or freehand. Give it a shot becky_a, you’re probably underestimating yourself a LOT!

Can We Talk?

Today I’d like to take a baby step outside my comfort zone and talk about journaling. I struggle with it. I don’t love it. I’m VERY uncomfortable with it. But I know it’s an important part of memory-keeping, so I work at it. I know some of you are shaking your heads, because you’ve read my tutorials and you know how wordy I am. 😉 But somehow, I hate to put all those words onto my layouts.

So let’s deconstruct journaling a little. Why is it important? Well, first of all, the viewer isn’t necessarily going to know who is in the photos, what they’re doing, when it occurred, why they’re together or where it happened. Basic journalism 101. Some of these factors aren’t important every time, but for a scrapbooking layout to be meaningful, at least a couple of them should be included. A date and a location might be all that’s needed. For other layouts, like heritage layouts using very old family photos, more detail isn’t only needed, it’s what makes the layout special. Take this one for example.

I’ve put all the pertinent details in there. Now when others see it, they know a little about this boy. What it doesn’t say is why this layout is important to me, how Kenneth is connected to me… it’s lacking context. But if I tell you it’s part of a family history scrapbook, where I’ll include an extensive, multi-generation family tree, then it might not matter. (Kenneth is currently part of a genealogical mystery my cousin Lynne and I are trying to solve. He’s my first cousin twice removed while Lynne is one generation closer to him; he may have been “born on the wrong side of the blanket”. Now to prove it!)

Another aspect of journaling that matters is format. My personal dislike of narrative journaling is reflected in many of my layouts by its absence. But to other scrappers, narrative works. They’re able to tell a complete story within their page, filled with detail… and my deepest admiration! When I try to do that, it sounds stilted and boring. Here’s a glimpse into Katherine Woodin‘s life; her pages are always filled with day-to-day events and are like a pictorial diary.

Others use narrative journaling to process difficult events, as Biancka did here. That takes GUTS, ladies!!

So how can I inject some context into my layouts without resorting to my brand of stiff, boring, wordy text? Oh there are SO many ways!

Quotes are a good way of both illuminating the layout and grounding the subject matter. If I can find a quote that says what I want to say much more eloquently than I can, I’ll take it! Here’s an example.

Song lyrics are, in my mind, PERFECT for journaling! When I heard this song for the first time, this girl instantly came to mind. Then the perfect photo (by Erin Wallis Photography) came into my hands. Meant to be?

Word art can help tell a story very effectively. This layout is part of my Ireland collection and will be bookended by other layouts related to the Famine to provide more context.

This layout has more detail to flesh out the story.

Let’s not forget journal cards. They’re a combination of word art and sentiment, which can be very useful. Even if they’re just a spot to put your journaling, they can be just what your layout needs. I know I don’t use them as often as I should. For this layout I used a card that had space for me to put my own words, and I used a quote from my daughter. It says it all!

What about word strips? I LOVE them! They can take on the whole job of telling your story; it’s just a matter of finding ones that work. If you have a sense of humour, you can use word strips that actually relate to something else, but communicate your message effectively. In this example, the word strips I used came from a 2014 July Buffet kit from Ponytails, who no longer is a member of the GingerScraps family. They’re Canadian slang terms: Double Double is a shorthand Tim Horton’s coffee order, Beauty is a synonym of fantastic and Eh! is a pure Canadianism. But they made sense with my photo.

What creative journaling methods do you use? Help a girl out here!

Pick Your Pivot Point

Today’s tutorial is a quickie – short, sweet and very much to the point. The PIVOT POINT that is! I’d seen a tutorial at another site that was compiled by the talented Yobeth Puckett, and I filed it away to examine more closely another time. Yesterday, I dragged it out and tried to make sense of it. Unsuccessfully. At first. Because I was overthinking it. But believe you me, this is going to be a boon to all of us because it’s going to speed up our scrapping and reduce frustration by a lot. I know I’m going to incorporate it into my workflow, starting today.

So you know how sometimes you’re using a template and you decide you really want the stripes on your paper to run diagonally instead of horizontally. So you drag and drop your paper onto your template, then you rotate it to the desired angle. But it looks like my screenshot – the paper isn’t covering the whole paper shape mask you’re planning to clip it to. Then you nudge the paper until it covers the shape. Many steps. But…

Have you paid any attention to the controls the Move tool provides? I know I didn’t. But I’m never going to ignore them again. See that little box made up of dots? It’s a POWERFUL thing. Notice that the central dot is selected.

That gray dot signifies the Pivot Point around which the object rotates. So if I left the centre dot selected, the paper would spin on centre. But if I MOVE the selection to another one of those dots, it changes the Pivot Point!

See? By moving the Pivot Point to the middle of the right side, then rotating my paper on THAT point, the shape is completely covered! To quickly get the exact angle I want on the pattern, I typed in a numeric in the Angle box rather than try to hit a moving target.

Then all I had to do was clip the paper to the shape. As you already know, I use keyboard shortcuts rather than click on a tab, drag the cursor down an options list then click on the one I want. Quick clipping is achieved by CTRL/CMD>G for versions prior to 14 and CTRL/CMD>ALT>G for versions 14 and up.

Sweet! Now I know a shortcut for rotating a paper. But what about something that isn’t symmetrical, like this piece of ribbon. I want the knot to sit on top of the bow’s knot, but I want the ribbon to be at about a 30° angle to the bow. How can it be rotated around a different Pivot Point? Is it even a thing??

Here’s what usually happens. I rotate the ribbon. Then I have to nudge it until the two knots line up. Not the end of the world, but boy, it would be nice to be able to do it even more quickly and easily. Work Smart Not Hard is my mantra after all!

The actual Pivot Point is at the centre of the bounding box around the ribbon, but I want it on the knot. I tried using the tool’s command box but it was a colossal fail. None of the options was right.

This is what happened when I selected the upper left corner of the box. Better, but not what I want.

This is the part where I struggled with Yobeth’s tutorial. I was really overthinking it, trying to drag the Pivot Point to where I wanted it while holding down the ALT key. But all I had to do was hold the ALT key down and CLICK on the spot where I wanted the Pivot Point to go.

It really IS that simple!!!!

I can think of so many ways to use this trick. One that immediately jumped to mind is for rotating photos to match the angle of photo spots on templates. It’ll save so much nudging, I’m not even kidding!

Now I’m ready to create my layout for the Storytelling Challenge. My examples here were set up using some of the items I’m going to use from LouCee Creations‘ Shampoodle and Setter kit. It should be finished and in the Gallery by the time this tut goes live. See you all next week!

Even Sketchier Still!

I know, I know… I’ve already shown you more than one way to turn a photo into a sketch. But I haven’t shown you THIS way, which is the easiest and most interesting method I’ve learned to date. And it’s a GUIDED EDIT in PSE 2019 (Amazon Prime Day – $59!) so you know it’s going to be a cinch. Well, it can be as easy or complicated as you make it. I tried this Edit on several photos before deciding that for the sake of expedience, I’d go with the photo below.

This Partial Sketch Edit is reached via Guided>Fun Edits. Right there in the middle!

The Control Panel looks like this and completely leads you through the process. I’m going to show you the results of each of the four options so you can see how it looks and lets you imagine how you could use it.

I’m going to move top to bottom and left to right with the options, starting with the Pencil Sketch. This photo is divided horizontally so it’s not going to be a lot of work to make my selection. The selection portion is the most difficult and time-consuming part of the process. (Just a reminder… the Cancel button takes you right back to Square One, literally, so don’t click it unless you WANT to start all over.)

One thing I discovered right off the bat is that the effect appears as the selection is made. You can see it as it changes. I’m showing a selection made with a fairly small brush at 100% Opacity but there’s nothing that says you can’t do whatever you like. If you’re adept at selection, you can use a bigger brush; don’t forget that you can toggle back and forth between Adding to your selection and Subtracting from it. That means you can remove areas from your selection that you don’t want to convert to a sketch while you go. The Undo (CTRL/CMD>Z) command will take you back a single step if you find too much of the photo is selected with one click.

So, in the Pencil Sketch mode at 100%, there’s not a lot of detail visible in the lake. The mountains are well-defined but that’s about all. The clouds are so important to the overall composition so let’s find them.

Ah, there they are! To my eyes, this looks like it’s part sketch and part watercolour. After the Opacity is where you want it, if there’s any fine-tuning your selection needs to give you the look you want, you can click on the Detail Brush and fix it up.

The refining I did isn’t really obvious, and there wasn’t a lot needed.

The best sketch effects blend gently into the photo, and PSE makes that as simple as moving a slider over to the right. Watch as you slide so you know when to stop.

The software developers at Adobe are really upping their game. This Edit also includes a Flip Effect option. So you can turn the part of the photo you DIDN’T select into the sketch and the sketch part back to a photo just with one click.

The second option is a Colored Pencil Sketch. I didn’t know if it would look substantially different from the Pencil Sketch version once I adjusted the Opacity, so let’s take a look.

There definitely is a hint of colour in the lake this time.

With a little tweaking I’ve got this.

And with the edge between photo and sketch softened…

Before I use the Flip Effect button, let’s look at the Pencil and Colored Pencil side by side. Remember there’s a 20% difference in Opacity between them. There is a difference, but I’m not convinced the software is why.

Okay, here’s the Flipped Colored Pencil version.

This one has a lot of promise. How will an Old Photo sketch effect look?

Ah! Very cool!! For reasons I haven’t divined, I had trouble making my selection for this one to exclude the little spit of land at the centre-right of the photo. So after a number of failed attempts to duplicate the selection used in the previous versions, I just let PSE have its way.

See how the mood is SO different with this version? I can’t wait to try it on some of my real old photos.

I really like the way this one looks.

Flipped, maybe not so much. But I do love all the texture.

What will Old Paper do that Old Photo didn’t?

There is a noticeable difference; those creases are awesome!

Dropping the Opacity to about 45% (yeah, too quick on the PrtScr finger!) looks like this. Still moody, but not quite as stormy.

Flipped is pretty. I can’t pick just one!

I can see any (or all) of these printed and framed. Or on a greeting card. Or surrounded by beautiful elements on a layout. So many ways to use this!! I hope you’ll give it a try and let me know how you like it.