Celebrating Grads and Dads Again

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Are y’all getting tired of font-based posts? Lately I’ve been looking at fonts from a bit of a different perspective, searching for those that would be suitable for cutting with my Cricut for cards. When I was making my Father’s Day cards this year, I ended up using an old standby, Lumberjack Regular – the very font I use to create the text on my tutorial screenshots. I think it worked fairly well, considering the text I cut was only about 1/2 an inch tall…

While I was browsing at dafont.com, I noticed a few [100% free, no-pennies!!] fonts that I could easily use to create titles for graduation and Father’s Day layouts too. I’m going to share some of them with you today. As with past font posts, each is linked directly to the download to make it easier for me to enable your font hoarding. Just click on the font name, in red.

I think this grungy font Nexa Rust Slab would work for both grads and dads. It might look fabulous with one of the gradient techniques we’ve played with recently.

College Boy has a varsity vibe and could be used for both titling and text.

Reach has several variations included in the download.

Stitch’n School has a letterman’s jacket look to it. I wish I could have put my letter on my varsity curling sweater.

Athletica already has a gradient applied!! I would probably find a way to make it metallic using Styles.

Now for the dads… Hot Winner Team might actually be suitable for both. I like the condensed form and the funky angle on the horizontal aspects of the letters.

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This one, Hand Shop Typography A20 is sort of similar, but still different enough. Be advised, the only numerals in the download are the 2 and the 0.

I like the vintage look to Rumble Brave. It’s a bit of a fairytale-hero font, don’t you think?

I love the texture I see with Inlander. It could be zhuzhed up with some Styles for a unique title. Chipboard or felt would be perfect.

Kingston Roman makes me think of gladiators. Who doesn’t love a good toga? 😉

Speaking of superheroes… Smallville actually included the curved title! You can find it by using the tilde [ ~ ] key.

Catastrophic Consequences is perfect for journaling. Clean, upright, legible – exactly what good journaling needs.

Here’s one for the gamer dads. Darks Skyrim has so much potential. I could see it with a shiny shades-of-blue gradient. Yeah!!

And one more journaling font, Philosopher. It’s a little fancier but still clean and clear.

I’ll confess, I’m really struggling with scrapping inspiration and even more with tutorial topics. After almost 350 tuts, it’s really hard to come up with fresh stuff. I may have to make some changes. Stay tuned.

Autumn and Creepy Season Fonts

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Have you chosen the font(s) for your October Signature Challenge siggy or Inspiration Challenge? Have I got some options for you! Now, Heather‘s instructions for the Signature call for a “beautiful font”, while Joy just wants 2 different fonts in the title. Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think you’d be quite safe using a creepy/spooky font for the siggy, and anything goes for the other. I took a quick wander through the dafont.com collection of FREE fonts and found some I didn’t have but must… and I’m going to share them with you. Each font/dingbat’s name is linked to the site so you can quickly and easily download the ones you love.

I didn’t find any fonts that really proclaimed *AUTUMN*, but there are some lovely dingbats (little drawings). This one is called LCR Autumn Harvest Dings. The scarecrow sold me on it!

KR Fabulous Fall has some lovely leaves.

Next up is WM Leaves 1, which is literally all leaves, complete with the Canadian stylized maple leaf from our flag.

Autumn Days Clipart has a selection of solid symbols. Just look at that cute little fox.

I love the line drawings in Arboris Folium. They can be used like stamps or brushes and are filled with potential.

While we’re doing dingbats, let’s carry on into the Hallowe’en sets I found. Freaky Halloween has some classic images, like those creepy jack-o-lanterns.

I LOVE the frame in Alit Halloween. And the spiderweb, and the crow, and the haunted house… well ALL of them.

Look at the creepy witches’ hats here in Halloween Dreams Doodles!

This set, simply named Halloween, has more, very detailed line drawings.

Ooh, Vintage Halloween is really creepy.

Now on to some actual fonts. I’ve never seen this one before. Gnarly Skeleton has both an outlined alphabet and a bold version. That skull is in the glyphs section, along with an assortment of symbols and accented letters. No numbers though.

Halloween Guises is a bubble font with more of a cute look to it. There are numerals and a bunch of glyphs too.

Spoky Spider (not a typo) is both cute and creepy.

Halloween Party 3 has elements of both font and dingbat. There are numerals and glyphs galore here.

I feel like Spooky Halloween is my favourite of all today. It has upper and lower case alphabets and numerals but no glyphs.

Nightside is a bold, Gothic font that made me think of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s a demo font, meaning only upper case alphabet, no numerals or glyphs.

Then I found Nightmare 5… which also made me think of Tim Burton, or maybe the Addams Family. It has no numerals or clyphs; to achieve the look in the sample, use alternating upper and lower case letters.

And THEN… I found Burton’s Nightmare! It’s not really scary or creepy, but definitely has a vibe. There are numerals, some accented letters and some punctuation.

Okay, so maybe Single Ghost is my actual favourite! It’s got it all, wrapped up in a very elegant package.

Last, I have Dracolas for you. It’s Goth, it’s vintage and elegant. It’s a bold, all-caps font with the lower case characters smaller and less fancy. And there are glyphs!

Did you see anything you like? Did you find Inspiration for Joy‘s Challenge? I think I might pair Nightmare with Single Ghost. I’ll have to go back and make sure I’ve downloaded all the ones I love.

3D Title – Paper Letters

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Today’s tutorial is in response to a request from Glee. She’d seen a layout in a gallery created by biche57 that had a paper-letter title with the letters stitched to the background. The letters appeared to be lifted away from the background, sort of like butterfly wings. “How’d she do that??” Well, this is how JAN would do it…

I’m using the June Font Challenge font for my layout, and then Clipping papers to each individual letters. You can absolutely use an alpha to get it done faster and with fewer steps. The papers I’m using are from the GingerBread Ladies‘ collab Outdoorsy.

Here’s a little Quick Trick I just discovered. You can BATCH-SIMPLIFY all the text layers! To activate them all, click>shift click on the first and last text layers. Then right-click and choose Simplify Layer.

Here you can see that I’ve Clipped papers to each letter layer. Right-click>Create Clipping Mask or CTRL/CMD>ALT/OPT>G for Elements versions 15 and newer. For older versions the shortcut is just CTRL/CMD>G. To make each letter easier to manage, the paper and letter layers should be Merged. Activate the two layers then right-click>Merge or CTRL/CMD>E.

There! Now I have my paper title. Let’s stitch them down.

My granddaughter’s backpack is lavender, so I thought, why not use lavender stitches? You can put those stitches wherever you like; they’ll be your anchor for lifting the paper, so I felt it was best if I ran the stitches through the centre of the Bs.

We’re creating the illusion that those letters are lifted away from the background, and the easiest way to do that is to use custom shadows. For a lot of you this will be a review so feel free to skip ahead. I won’t mind! (I also won’t know. 😉 ) For those who haven’t seen the previous custom-shadow tuts, we start with Selecting the outline of the object we’re shadowing. To do that, CTRL/CMD>click on the letter’s thumbnail – that little picture of what’s on that layer – in the Layers Panel. That engages the marching ants and gets them doing their drill around the contours of the letter.

Now add a new blank layer UNDERNEATH the layer you’ve just selected. CTRL/CMD>click on the sheet-of-paper icon at the top left of the Layers Panel.

Over at the Color Picker, choose your shadow colour by clicking on the Foreground Color as shown. I’m using black [#000000] but a lot of people like a browner colour like #2c2801. It’s up to you. Then grab the Paint Bucket Tool and dump it into the outline.

Before Elements will let you do anything else, you’ll have to Select>Deselect or CTRL/CMD>D to stop the ants from marching.

The quickest, most effective way to simulate lifting the paper away is to use the Image>Transform>Distort Tool. This lets us change both the size and shape of the image in all directions. The only real limit is how far you take it. Remember to have your shadows all falling in the same direction; decide where your light source is so you can be consistent.

Click-drag one corner of the Bounding Box at a time until you get the shape you want. See how my Bounding Box isn’t symmetrical any more?

To hone the shadow and add realism to it, the shadow needs to be very narrow where the stitches are holding the letter down. I use the Smudge Tool for that. I push the shadow toward the letter at the stitches, and pull the shadow away where I want the paper lifting. The Smudge Tool also adds a slight Blur, but not usually enough to look real.

So… we’ll add a Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur… to the shadow.

To be able to see a Preview of the Filter, click your cursor on the edge of your shadow. Then you can see up close how moving the slider softens the edges of your shadow. Remember, shadows are softer the more light is allowed to leak underneath an object – the farther away from the surface it’s sitting on it is, the softer the shadow. Hot Tip: you don’t have to go through all the Filter steps if you’re going to use the same settings for each layer. Just click CTRL/CMD>F and Elements will do the rest.

To be realistic, the background colour shows through the shadow. To achieve that requires changing the Blend Mode from Normal to Linear Burn.

To make it look less stark and harsh, decrease the Opacity of that shadow layer. Move the slider until you’re happy with what you see. I like 35% – for now – and it’ll be adjustable if I decide it’s too light or dark.

After each letter is shadowed, the stitches need shadows too. I just went with the same steps, but without the Distort and Smudge. I also used a much lighter touch with the Blur because the stitches are literally IN the paper so the shadows will be sharper.

Last thing is to make any tweaks you think will make your title really POP. I just use the Smudge Tool!

I know this method of creating shadows sounds complicated and labour-intensive. At first, it really is. But the more you do it, the easier and more intuitive it becomes. I don’t even really think about the steps now, they’re so familiar. It’s the shadows that really elevate a layout, so it’s worth practicing. Don’t forget to have fun! Next week we’re going to play with doodles.

More Hearts and Flowers Fonts

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It’s been a rough week at our house, meaning no time for me to do anything really inspiring. But I’ve been seeing a LOT of inspiring Valentine’s Day projects so I had a thought… Surely there are some great new Valentine’s Day fonts and dingbats that y’all can use those Styles we talked about last week to make REALLY fabulous. And there are!! I’ve got eleven FREE fonts and six dingbats for your scrapping pleasure, from dafont.com. (If you want any of these, just click on the font’s name and you’ll be linked up.) Ready?

Couple Valentine is a fancy, all-caps font that would be perfect for pretty much any application. Titles, subtitles, journaling – all of it! I love that.

This romantic script font, Mybook Again, is another multipurpose gem. I could see this on wedding invitations, all kinds of wedding favours and Valentines. It’s beautiful, don’t you think?

I really love these bubble fonts like Romantic Love. There are SO many ways to use them and so many things you can do to zhuzh them up.

Pink Valentine is so retro and cute! It brings me right back to my teenage years when I still had rose-coloured glasses.

This font could be right out of a fairy tale. Lovaline Story is another versatile font that is suitable for any purpose.

Candy Kisses would make beautiful titles. Beyond Valentine’s Day and weddings, I’d probably use it for baby layouts.

Beauty Heart is a lovely farmhouse-type font. I’d love to see it with a glossy Style so it looks like candy.

I like the heart ligatures on Finding Love. It’s yet another all-purpose font with infinite options.

Ooh, here’s a swashy script called Jully Julia. It’s perfect for subtitles and journaling.

I don’t know that I’d use You Are My Valentine for journaling, but it would be good for titles and subtitles.

I was looking for dingbats when I found Quirky Love. It’s already pretty fabulous, and has potential to be even more so! Doesn’t it look like leather?

Now for the dingbats. Heart Salads is the first set I’ve found that has an anatomical heart in it.

I can see so many things that can be done with Romantine Dingbat. Yes, most of them involve hitting them with a Style… or three.

I love these heart emoji dings, don’t you? Fluffy Hearts Ding just makes me smile.

PW Little Hearts covers the gamut of things we love. That heart-with-the-ball-of-yarn would make a great element for a cat layout.

These are pretty romantic hearts in Vanlentines Day TBF. I think my favourite is the solid heart with the stars along the right side.

Last, but not least, we have Merciful Heart Doodle. I might use this one to create a border. What would you do with it?

Now I must run… gotta deal with all the errands I’ve put off for the last week while my son has been sick. Hopefully I’ll get ’em done before the rain turns to snow…

It’s the Snowy Season! (Fancifying a Font)

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If you’ve thought about taking part in the Font Challenge this month, you probably live in North America and have lots of snowy photos you can work with. Snowy Season is a showy font with lots of visual interest. It’s an all-caps font with scaled lower-case characters, a full set of numerics and the most commonly-used punctuation, which makes it a great title option. I think it would make for difficult reading as a journaling font though. Today’s tutorial will show you how to make the snowy parts of the font look like actual snow! Read on…

Before we get into the meat of the tutorial I want to welcome all the new GingerScrappers who have joined us in the last while and give an overview of Tutorial Tuesday. The first two Tuesdays of the month will focus on techniques that elevate our 2 dimensional layouts into 3D masterpieces. The third Tuesday is Challenge Spotlight day, when I share YOUR layouts and discuss what makes them special and interesting. On the fourth Tuesday, I provide a Quick Trick that will speed up your workflow. When I create these tutorials I want them to be achievable by anyone, with any amount of experience with digital scrapping. To that end, I typically provide both written and visual instructions of every step in the process I’m demonstrating. If you already are proficient you have my blessing to skip over all the extra instruction. I try to use free or software default fonts and styles wherever possible so you’re not having to shop before you can play. Most tutorials are for Photoshop Elements, which is the most commonly used software and what I work with. There are usually multiple ways to accomplish a task. I like to Work Smart, Not Hard, so I’ll show you the easiest/fewest keystroke ways, and include keyboard shortcuts where they exist. I work in Windows but recognize that there are a lot of Mac people out there. So any keyboard shortcut will include the appropriate function keys for both PC and Mac. For example, the keyboard shortcut for Merge Layers is CTRL>E for PC users and CMD>E for Mac users. So when I include Merge Layers in a tutorial it will look like this: CTRL/CMD>E. The other function keys that are part of keyboard shortcuts are the ALT (PC) and OPT (Mac) keys. Make sense? Now for today’s tut!

Our winter began a full 6 weeks early than usual and brought us a LOT of snow. I like to think outside the box when it comes to titles for my layouts and sometimes will do a Google search for related words, phrases or synonyms. That’s how I came up with this one. Notice the transparency inside the snowy bits. If I just used the font as is, whatever is behind my title will show in the snowy areas. Not what I want!

Before I can manipulate this title, the text needs to be Simplified. The actual text itself will no longer be editable so make sure it’s spelled properly and it says what you want it to say before you Simplify. One way to do this is to click Layer tab on the taskbar that sits at the top of your workspace then choose Simplify Layer. Or right-click on the text layer and choose Simplify Layer from the drop-down menu.

I made a Copy Layer of the title so I could work on a Copy and not the original. There are several ways of doing this. Click Layer>Duplicate Layer… on the taskbar. Or right-click on the layer then choose Duplicate Layer… from the drop-down menu. Both these will open another menu where you’re asked where the duplicate layer will go. In this instance, it’ll go into this project, so all you’d need to do is click OK on that pop-up. Or easiest for copying layers within the same project, CTRL/CMD>J will just do it all.

Here’s the pop-up I mentioned above.

Now I’ve made the original title layer invisible so I can see what I’m doing to the Copy Layer. Just click on the eyeball to close it.

I’m going to remove everything but the snowy areas from the title. I added a Layer Mask to it by clicking on the icon at the top of the Layers Panel that looks like a gray circle in a blue square. Why a Layer Mask? It lets you hide parts of a layer but not make them actually disappear. It gives you the most control you can have over what happens to your image. More later.

This is where Elements puts the Layer Mask. You want to be sure you’re working on the MASK and not the LAYER itself. When you look at the Layers Panel you’ll see a blue line box around the active part of the layer. Be careful to make sure you’re on the MASK.

Next, activate the Eraser Tool. You’ll have another reminder that you’re working on a MASK because the Color Picker will show black and white. It there are any other colours there, you’re NOT on the mask. If you remember “White REVEALS and Black CONCEALS” it’ll help with your task… but this mnemonic is referring to what’s BEHIND the object you’re masking. The magic of Layer Masks is that it lets you erase things, but if you accidentally remove a part you wanted to keep, it’s not really gone. For example, sometimes my track-pad sticks and my cursor goes haywire, erasing EVERYTHING it touches. To recover that stuff, I just toggle my colour from white to black and reveal it again by rolling my cursor over the oops. Toggling between foreground and background colours is easy, just click the X key.

Make sure your snowy areas are completely enclosed with a thin border of your font colour. It’ll save you a lot of grief later.

This is what you’ll be left with on the Copy Layer once you’ve concealed all the non-snow areas. Zoom in and go over all of it while you still have the ability to correct any little issues. Once you’ve moved on to the next step it’ll be too late…

Now, to be able to play with this layer, the Layer Mask has to be integrated into the layer by Simplifying it. Same steps as for the initial title.

As soon as your Layer Mask was integrated, your Color Picker will have returned to whatever colours you’d had there before. Set your foreground colour to white: you can either click your cursor on the upper left corner of the palette or you can type “ffffff” into the hex code # box.

Now to fill the snowy areas with white. I tried my preferred method of New Fill Layer>Solid Color>Use Previous Layer as Clipping Mask but all it Filled was the outline. In retrospect, that might have worked just as well as what I ended up doing. Keep that in mind as we proceed. I used the Paint Bucket to click-and-fill the snowy areas. This method is imperfect, sometimes leaving areas unfilled around the edges. That can be overcome by Filling again. As you can see from the screenshot, there’s still a navy blue outline that detracts from the look I want. Here’s where it might have been better to use the Fill Layer process, THEN the Paint Bucket. Live and learn!! Instead, I worked unsmart…

I essentially did the same thing that using the Fill Layer>Paint Bucket method would have done but with WAY more steps. I covered up the blue outline with a Stroke. Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection…

To expand on the EXTRA steps I took, I had to experiment to find the right size and location for the Stroke. I settled on 6 pixels and Inside to conform to the contours of each snowy shape.

Okay, that looks a lot better. Still a few areas where the Stroke didn’t quite cover the outline – another reason to advocate for using the Fill Layer>Paint Bucket route.

Now to add some dimension! I experimented to find the right combo for this step. Click the Styles button at the bottom of the Layers Panel then go up to the drop-down menu at the top of the Layers Panel and choose Bevels. These are stock Styles that came with the software.

I got the best results with the Simple Inner Bevel as shown. I know it makes the snow look like toothpaste, but Styles are adjustable! Double-click on the fx icon on the layer to open the adjustments menu then push the Size slider to the left until it stops looking like it’s sitting in your bathroom sink. To reduce the glaring shadows, decrease the Opacity of the beveled layer to 66% or so.

Now make another Copy Layer of the snow. We’ll add some glitter to it so it glistens like real snow. CTRL/CMD>J. (Learn the keyboard shortcuts! They’re amazing!!)

Ugh. Let’s get rid of the glop. Right-click on the layer then choose Clear Layer Style. That’ll remove the bevel from the Copy Layer.

You may already have some fine white glitter loaded into your Styles collection. I didn’t have the one I wanted so I went to my Styles folder by clicking on the stack of lines to the top left of the Styles Panel and chose Load Styles. This is where your software stores Styles; if you’ve purchased some to coordinate with your kits this is where Elements will look for them. I’ll put together a tutorial on managing Styles later. For right now I’ll just give you the bare bones.

Here’s the result of applying fine white glitter, then decreasing the Opacity of that layer to 60% so the contours of the layer below are visible.

The finished title! I’m really happy with how it looks. Next time I’ll learn from my errors and skip a few steps!

See you next week. Which Challenge will be in the Spotlight?

October-y Fonts

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The calendar says it’s fall, although where I am it’s still quite summery – I’m wearing shorts and flipflops, which is very much NOT October in Canada. The leaves are changing and the nights have a chill to them. So much inspiration for layouts, right? How about we look at some autumn-themed fonts for titles and journaling. And some dingbats too. All of them are free, from dafont.com and are linked so you can go right to them if you choose to grab them.

Autumn looks a lot like a vine, and is legible enough for journaling. It includes numerals and symbols as well as some alternate characters.

Autumn Pumkin is a more streamlined script that is also very versatile.

I like Autumn Leaves as a title font. It’s all upper-case, with a bunch of alternate characters and can be customized in so many ways.

Sketchy Autumn Dingbats can be incorporated into titles, filled with colour and turned into stickers or just resized and used much like a brush. The dingbats attached to the upper-case characters are different from the lower-case ones, so there are 52 sketchy little pics.

I like the simplicity of A Day in Autumn. It looks a little twiggy, a little leafy and is very legible so suitable for journaling. It has numerals and punctuation but no alternate characters.

LCR Autumn Harvest Dings is a limited collection of sketches. The characters A-P have dings attached. Don’t you love that scarecrow silhouette?

Falling is just a nice, curvy, script font; the only flaw is that it doesn’t include numerals.

KR Fabulous Fall is another 26-dingbat collection filled with leaves and other symbols of fall.

I think Harvest Fall would be ideal for subtitles, journaling and wordstrips. It has numerals, symbols and alternate characters galore!

WM Leaves 1 is another A-S dingbat font that includes a perfect Canadian-flag maple leaf. Yes please!

Tanaestal Doodle Leaves 01 looks like folk art. It includes 54 different shapes – upper- and lower-case and the period and comma keys have shapes attached.

Now, let’s do Hallowe’en! CF Halloween is up first. It’s an all-upper-case font with numerals but no punctuation.

I think Halloween Witches Script it my favourite, even though it doesn’t include the witch’s hat, spider or ghosts. It’s elegant and can (obviously) be combined with dingbats to make really fun text…

Dingbats like these! Freaky Halloween has it all.

Freaky Story is both creepy and refined. It’s another all-caps font, with the special characters hiding in the lower-case keys. It includes numerals and punctuation too.

Halloween is another fabulous assortment of dingbats you could use to customize your other fonts. What’s neat with this one is that the B, C and P keys give you the word “Halloween” plus some ghosts, bats, spiders and drippy blood. And it’s the only dingbat set I’ve seen that also has images attached to the number keys. Check it out!

Halloween Bell has 26 more themed dingbats.

I can see Spooky Halloween as a title font, can’t you? Unlike the other fancy fonts, this one DOES come with the fancy characters and you don’t even have to hunt for them. Numerals only though, no punctuation.

Halloween Rules doesn’t include those funky little skulls. I think it’s a cute-but-creepy, legible option.

I like Tricky Night for titles or subtitles. But don’t exclude it from journaling – it has numerals, punctuation and a bunch of alternate characters.

Last but not least, Spooky Webbie is cute, but still Halloween-y. It’s also the full package so you can use it for whatever your little heart desires.

Did you see anything that inspires you? I hope so!! Next week is Challenge Spotlight time, so I’ll be doing a Gallery crawl as soon as I recover from Canadian Thanksgiving…

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