Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

December 6, 2022 by Jan

Don’t Let Your Text “FLOAT”!

Have you ever wanted to run some text across an element, like a piece of washi tape, a paper ribbon, or even just over a crease in your digital paper, but then look at it and think, “Well that looks like garbage…”? Odds are you feel that way because the text isn’t grounded to the element and looks like it’s floating. Kathi (granny5pics) was in that situation and asked if I could help. This is it!

My example uses a piece of crumpled washi from Cheré Kaye‘s portion of the Beautiful Struggle collab she created with Aimee Harrison and Cindy Ritter, and a very creased label from Cindy Ritter‘s Autumn Treasures. Killing two birds with one stone, as it were.

After I typed out my text and positioned it where I wanted it, I Simplified the layer so that Elements will allow my changes. My method for Simplifying is to right-click on the layer then choose Simplify Layer. It can also be achieved by clicking Layer>Simplify Layer.

Next, I chose the Dodge Tool – the one that looks like the paddle the optometrist uses to close one of your eyes. This tool lightens the area it’s used upon; I like to start with less, then work my way up to more. My settings were Range: Highlights, Exposure: 30% (I adjusted that after I took the screenshot) and 45 pixels for my brush size. Note that I’m working on the text layer, not the tape layer, so the changes I make will only affect the text. I ran the Dodge brush over the parts of the text that are over top of areas where the light creates highlights, the creases on both the tape and the label. For straight lines like the creases in the label, click your Tool at one end of the area you’re working on, hold down the SHIFT key and click just past the other end. Don’t worry about going past the edges of the text; the Tool will only affect the layer you’re on. If you have text that crosses the same crease on multiple lines, you can do all of them in one pass.

Next I switched to the Burn Tool, the “OK” sign, and used similar settings. This tool darkens areas where it’s used. Again, I like to build the effect, because it’s easier to see when to stop. This time, I ran the brush over areas where the text crosses shadowed areas of the tape and the label. I adjusted the Size of the brush to suit the width of the shadowed areas by using the [ key to make it smaller, the ] key to make it larger. Zooming in and out let me see if I needed to go over any areas again.

Here’s a close-up. The arrows point out the areas where I’ve made my adjustments. I can see some dimension beginning to be visible.

I kept Dodging and Burning until I was satisfied. Then I planned how I was going to show the edge of the tape where the ink from my pen wouldn’t have reached the paper below.

The tear at the left edge of the tape is jagged so to help me out, I CTRL/CMD>clicked on the tape layer’s thumbnail to Select the edge, but kept the text layer as my active layer. Then I used a very small Eraser brush to erase a narrow bit of my text. I also shaved a thin strip along the bottom edge of the tape.

If I’d decided it still needed something, I could have used the Smudge Tool – the flying fickle finger of Fate – to gently push the top edge of the text toward the high crease on the tape, knowing that the Smudge Tool blurs the image a bit. But it looked right to me so this is what I’m happy with.

Here’s a Zoomed out look. Can you see the way the text seems to follow the contours of the tape and the creases in the label?

Here they are, side-by-side. I think you’ll all see it now!

PDF Version : https://bit.ly/3ju3KfO

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

November 29, 2022 by Jan

Custom Christmas Cards – a Re-view

PDF Version : http://bit.ly/3XM3OHp

Well, I knew it would happen sooner or later. I overdid it last week and have been dragging my butt around for the last couple of days. My brain has been MIA… Not even 12 hours of sleep has helped; I still feel like I’m running through wet concrete. Instead of just posting a sorry-there’s-no-tut-this-week message, I’m going to update an older, but still timely, tutorial for you. Have you seen the price on commercial Christmas/Chanukah cards lately? Crazy. It’s just crazy. So why not make your own?

I’m going to show you how to make 2 personal Christmas cards from 1 sheet of cardstock. The resulting cards are 4 1/4 inches by 5 1/2 inches. You can get 50 envelopes that will hold these beauties at Michaels for $8 (Canadian, so about $5 in the US).

If I would have been thinking I could have skipped this step by putting the dimensions in reverse in the New Document screen. But I didn’t so I had to Rotate the canvas 90°.

Next I snapped a line across the centre of the page, and another from top to bottom. I used the Ruler and the Pencil Tool. To snap a straight line in a project, select the Pencil Tool and set the size of the line you want. I wanted these lines to be faint, so I went with 1 pixel. Line up the cursor with the halfway point along one side of your canvas. You can see a moving dashed line on the Ruler so you’ll know when you’re in the right place. Click once just barely inside the edge of your canvas. Then hold down the Shift key and move the cursor to the same spot on the opposite side and click again. It’s just that easy. Then do the same with the top-to-bottom centre point. These are guidelines for placement of elements and for cutting and scoring later.

Then I opened up the folder where I’d collected the objects I wanted to use. I have a photo taken several Christmases ago, a 3D snowflake from Lindsay Jane‘s Snowed Under kit and a mask from PrelestnayaP‘s December Wishes.

Working in the lower left corner of the canvas, I opened up the Shape Tool, chose the Rectangle, set a Fixed Size of 5.25 by 4 inches and chose a darkish green colour.

The resulting rectangle will fit inside the guidelines for one card. and by Simplifying the layer, I can make adjustments to it as needed because it’s now a Smart Object.

The next step is to add the mask. I resized it to fit inside the green rectangle completely.

The photo went on top of the mask and was resized to approximately the size I’d need. I want the deer and some of the illuminated snow visible later.

Clipping the photo to the mask is simple. Right click>Create Clipping Mask or CTRL/CMD>ALT>G for more recent versions of PSE or just CTRL/CMD>G for versions pre-15.

Final position tweaks included a little shifting and a little more shrinking.

I chose a gold colour from my photo to use for the sentiment. Here’s where all those amazing fonts you have in your stash will come in handy. You can make this text as personal as you want, even making it family- or person-specific. But it still looked like it needed something. So I CTRL/CMD>clicked on the green rectangle layer’s thumbnail to select the outer edges of the rectangle. Then Select>Modify>Contract.

I pondered for a nanosecond how much I should shrink my selection and settled on 25 pixels.

And then I added a Stroke to the new selection. Edit>Stroke (Outline) Selection

I then used the same gold as for the text and added my Stroke. The position for this isn’t a make-or-break thing, so don’t obsess over it.

Yes, I think that’s what it needed.

The final step for this card is to add a trademark to the back. I went with the green for this.

Knowing that it’s on the BACK of the card and should be readable with the card right-side-up, I Rotated the text 180°. Alternatively, I could use that tip Pam K posted from a few weeks ago: Click the Image tab>Rotate>Flip Layer Vertical. Much easier!!

I’m going for 100% honesty here… I saw a card like this second one on Pinterest so I’m not taking credit for the idea. (Ignore the typo on the screenshot please!) I added a new blank layer to the stack and Loaded some watercolour Brushes. These are from a set of 20 free brushes from Brusheezy. I chose 3 shades of wintery blue for the brush area.

I layered the brushes, each on its own layer so I can make adjustments to just one – or all – if I need to.

For a bit of contrast I chose an aqua for the topmost brush layer.

I added in the snowflake and sized it appropriately. But it wasn’t quite enough by itself. So I added a Layer Style from Ooh La La Scraps‘ In the Frosty Air collection.

It still was missing something so I turned off the snowflake layer for a second and added a white paint splatter. That makes a big difference!

A few words and it’s pretty much what I was looking for.

A trademark on the back in the dark blue and it’s finished! [Just Copy the trademark layer and nudge it into place.]

I saved the file as a .png so the printer wouldn’t need to add a white background to everything. To turn this into cards, I’ll load up my printer with white cardstock and print several copies. Using my guillotine cutter I’ll cut the cards apart on the top-to-bottom guideline and score then fold along the side-to-side guideline. I choose to print my sentiments for the inside of the card on resume paper (it’s a bit fancier than regular printer paper) and trim to fit the inside of the folded card. Word art would be perfect for this! Here’s a handy tip for searching in the GingerScraps Shop. On the left side of the Shop home page there’s a Search box. Type the theme/word you’re looking for in the box, then click on Advanced Search. When the Search panel opens up, untick Product Title and SKU, then type Word Art in the Search in Category box as shown. Magically, you’ll have a handful or so of results – only word art that relates to your key words! It’s fabulous.

Another option is to use a sentiment stamp and ink in a colour to match the front of the card. All that’s left is to sign them, pop them into their envelopes and mail them! Best part? There’s still time to make a stack of them and get them in the mail!

PDF Version : http://bit.ly/3XM3OHp

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

November 22, 2022 by Jan

Quick Trick: Auto Colour Correction

PDF Version : http://bit.ly/3GTAA3e

With Thanksgiving looming over all our American members, it’s pretty convenient that today’s regularly-scheduled tutorial is a Quick Trick.

Today’s Quick Trick is another CS/CC-to-PSE workaround. Colour correction can be a bit of a time suck in Elements. But this little trick is brilliant! It uses an Adjustment Layer to accomplish in a couple of steps what can take MANY steps in any other method. The colours in this photo were so much more vivid in real life and just didn’t make it into the camera. So let’s give it a whirl.

Click Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Levels. All changes to the photo will happen on the new layer, so if you don’t like the change you can save the original as is.

I like to Clip the mask to the previous layer. It isn’t essential, but it does ensure that the two layers move as one. Click OK. The dialog box in the upper corner will come into play in the next step.

To access this hidden menu, hold down the ALT/OPT key then click the Auto button. As the screenshot says, the default setting is Enhance Per Channel Contrast. For this tutorial we’ll select Find Dark & Light Colors and Snap Neutral Midtones. You’ll see what’s happening to the image in real time behind the dialog box. If you think you might use this trick again, it can be set as a default so that when you click Auto in the Adjustment Layer menu, Elements will automatically do all these steps.

Here’s the result. It’s subtle, but definitely better. The artemesia in the background is whiter, the pink coneflower is pinker, the centaurea montana is bluer, there’s more definition in the leaves and the green cast is gone! No tinkering, just boom!

Since I’ve gotten some feedback about a side-by-side look, here it is!

That’s it. That’s all! Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating this week. And remember, football is just a game…

PDF Version : http://bit.ly/3GTAA3e

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Individual Style)

November 15, 2022 by Jan

Challenge Spotlight: Created With Rewards

Here we are, at the third Tuesday of the month again. Crazy how time flies!! This month our Challenge Spotlight falls on Created With Rewards. For those unfamiliar, each month our GingerBread Ladies – the GingerScraps Design Team – work together to produce two Rewards kits, one for completing 10 Challenge layouts and one as a Free-with-Purchase. The Created With Rewards Challenge requires participants to use only the previous month’s Rewards kits; templates are the exception – they can come from anywhere. For October 2022, the Free With Purchase kit is called Bootiful; the Challenger Reward is We Are Family. Let’s see how our intrepid GingerScrappers have risen to the occasion. The layouts are in the order they were posted; each is linked to the Gallery – click on the scrapper’s nom de plume and you’ll jump right to the Gallery, where I hope you’ll leave some words of praise.

Our first layout is from Dovedesign. Her layout has a good portion of white space. She used Bootiful and took it off-theme, which is awesome!

Next up is this CUTE little Hallowe’en layout by Jill. I really like the spiderweb base for her paper cluster. She too used Bootiful.

For this layout, becky_a has used a block style to anchor her photos and added some seasonal clusters. Bootiful is getting lots of airtime!

Ah! Finally We Are Family makes an appearance. I like how hiddenartist has stacked papers in several ways and positioned her clusters to frame her photo.

I love how fontaine has used blended masks to such good effect here. The green and orange contrast beautifully and the little Bootiful witch and warlock are cute additions.

See how kabrak1207 has turned a very theme-specific kit into an all-purpose one? Without the word strip and sticker, it’s hard to tell this started out as a Hallowe’en kit.

This looks like greenfiend27 went to a lot of trouble adding all those little bats! I think they’ve been cut from the background paper and individually shadowed. Impressive!!

I love how Katherine Woodin used the Hallowe’eenie kit for a fall layout that has no Hallowe’en flavour at all.

What a clever riff on the donuts mum23ms has in her photos!

Here’s another mainly purple layout using Bootiful. The pops of orange breoni has added, along with vignetting some photos, give the layout depth.

Look at all the spookiness angbrey has injected into her layout! I love how the elements move the eye around and right back to the photos.

Here’s another look at We Are Family. The way gadawg83 has echoed the bluebonnets in her photo with her tiny-flower borders is perfection.

Tbear has used some incredibly inventive techniques here to give the impression that the beaker has bats painted onto the glass. And maybe I’ve been watching too much paranormal investigation TV, but I think I see a ghost flying out of the test tube!

Tamsin McAtee went for complementary colours here, with her orange and blue palette. I like how she picked out the brown from the ceiling in her photo and included it in the elements she used from We Are Family.

Our last layout comes from mom2triplets04. She too has used We Are Family and kept her layout simple, focusing on the photos and her journaling.

I find it fascinating that more than 75% of these layouts were created with the Free With Purchase kit. It tells me there was a lot of traffic in the shop in October, and that’s fantastic! It’s also really interesting to see how different scrappers’ visions are when it comes to using a single kit. It’s inspiring!!

See you next week for Quick Trick Tuesday.

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Challenge Spotlight, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, GingerBread Ladies, Tutorials Tagged With: challenge spotlight, Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Potpourri)

November 8, 2022 by Jan

Calling All Genealogist/Scrapbookers!

PDF Version : bit.ly/3EsDCc3

At the end of this week, Commonwealth countries will be taking a moment to remember our war dead. November 11th is Remembrance Day. (In the US it’s Veteran’s Day, a slightly different theme.) This time of year I think about all the people I’m connected to who have served in the military, not just the ones who died, but all of them. That got me thinking about how scrapbookers are family historians, whether they chronicle the current generation or dig up bones many generations past. Reading some discussions in the Forum has told me there are a lot of GingerScrappers who are interested in genealogy, and I’m sure many of them have treasured family photos of long-deceased ancestors. So today I’m going to talk a bit about scrapping with heritage photos, and share some scrapbooking collections I think are especially suited.

Photography came into being almost 200 years ago, with the first permanent image captured by Nicéphore Niépce, but it wasn’t 1839 and the invention of the daguerrotype by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre that it really got attention. Over the next couple of decades, many innovations were developed that allowed photos to be taken more quickly and for them to be printed on paper. Long exposure times meant that people being photographed had to remain as still as humanly possible for several minutes – motion blur was a real problem. It’s harder to smile consistently for several minutes than it is to keep one’s features relaxed, so most early photos with people in them looked pretty grim. Then too, life in those days was pretty harsh for the average person, so maybe smiling didn’t come naturally. If a family had the financial means to be photographed in the mid-1800s, they viewed it as a status symbol. Matthew Brady changed the photographic world forever when he captured the horrors of the War Between the States (nothing civil about it!).

Very few of us can claim famous ancestors. Mine were labourers: farmers, thatchers, miners, factory-workers, servants. Days were long and they worked hard. Clothing was utilitarian; dark colours were preferred because doing the laundry was a HUGE chore. And many dyes were very expensive, so only the wealthy could wear bright colours. Even when they wore their Sunday best, most people’s clothing was plain. My 3x Great-grandmother Sarah Ann Rump was a dressmaker, so she was dressed a little more fancy. Here’s a swatch to help you see what I’m talking about.

Furnishings were handed down from generation to generation. Upholstered items typically were also darker in colour to conceal the day-to-day dinginess that came from not having a vacuum cleaner. All of these things can be used to help date a photo if there’s no information about it. It can be a lot of fun trying to decide when a photo was taken, and it helps narrow down who the people could be. Then… the real fun begins! Turning the photos into memories preserved.

GingerScraps is lucky to have a very talented pool of designers whose heritage collections are treasures in and of themselves. I’m going to introduce you to some of them, and show you some impressive kits they’ve created. I know you’ll love them!

First, Diane of ADB Designs is the QUEEN of historical collections. She has one for pretty much every era and facet of life in North America. In the interest of keeping it reasonably fair, I’m only going to show you three of her collections. Each of them will be linked to the store so if you see something you like, you can go right to it!

Ancestors

Descendants

Cottage Retreat

Aimee Harrison is another designer with a sizeable assortment of beautiful kits. Here are two that I particularly like.

Old Lace

Somewhere In Time

Returning to GS after a few years’ hiatus, Cheré Kay Designs too has some very charming collections.

Thrifty Treasures

Connie Prince is prolific. She just cranks out amazing collections one after another!

Faded Memories

Heritage: Ancestors

Heritage: Ancestress

Dani, aka JB Studio, is quickly becoming a favourite designer for me.

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Kristina, whose designs are labelled Kristmess, has some very elegant kits in her store. This first one is a selfish inclusion – half of my DNA comes from Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

Celtic Charm

Roots

Memory Mosiac is Joy, one of our November Spotlight designers. I think I need this collection…

September Past

Ooh La La Scraps is one of the brands designed by Katie.

Remember When

And finally, Tami Miller Designs has some beautiful choices too.

I Collect Memories

I’ve barely scratched the surface here! And I’ve got the scrapping itch. Excuse me while I go peruse my photos… I think Sarah Ann needs a layout.

PDF Version : bit.ly/3EsDCc3

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Digital Scrapbooking, GingerBread Ladies, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

November 1, 2022 by Jan

Redirecting Text on your Embellishments

PDF Version : https://bit.ly/3DRkm8M

I’m never sure how complex I should go with tutorials that land on the first of a new month. There’s already so much going on and it’s easy to become overwhelmed with it all. So this month I went simple, but still very useful. Have you ever had an embellishment – think pocket card or fancy word strip – that you really wanted to use but it faces the wrong way to really work with the rest of the layout? You know flipping it won’t help because then the text would be backwards. And others notice that kind of thing… Well, here’s a fix!

My example will use a pocket card from CathyK Designs‘ Back to Nature kit. I want to put the card on the left of my photo and I want the deer looking AT the photo.

First, I’ll make a Copy Layer of the card. There are several ways to do this. You can click on the Layer tab at the top of the work space and select Duplicate Layer>OK. You can right-click on the layer in the Layers Panel and choose Duplicate Layer>OK. Or you can use a keyboard shortcut: CTRL/CMD>J. [Editor’s note: Keyboard shortcuts work with both Windows and Mac; Windows uses CTRL and Mac CMD.]

Now to flip the card so the deer is facing to the right. When using Photoshop CC you can flip single layers. In Photoshop Elements you can’t. So the easiest way to do it is to use the Move Tool, grab one of the “handles” on the side of the Bounding Box and drag it either vertically or horizontally. I get the flip process started this way, then I go to the dimensions box in the Tool Options toolkit and type in -100. For this one, the -100 went in the W(idth) box as shown. I do the same when I want to change the direction a spray of leaves or a ribbon is curving too.

The cards need to be stacked precisely with the backwards one on top of the original. Let your software do the work! Select both card layers (Click>Shift>Click).

Then go to the Align section of the Move Tool Options toolkit. Click on Left (side) and bingo, the top and bottom layers will be perfectly stacked.

Just like this!

Now, with only the top, backwards text layer active, I’ll add a Layer Mask to it by clicking on the icon at the top of the Layers Panel that looks like a blue sheet of paper with a white circle in the middle, as shown.

The Layer Mask sits to the right of the thumbnail on the Layers Panel. It’s simply a white box at this stage. You’ll know you’re working on the Mask and not the actual object when there’s a blue box outlining the Mask. Now I’ll activate my Eraser Tool.

Layer Masks are really useful when you’re removing parts of an object because it only makes the parts you’re removing invisible – they’re still there, just hidden. If you make a mistake – or the touchpad on your laptop is possessed and does its own thing – you can easily “paint” the part removed in error back in by switching foreground colours. Keep this mnemonic in mind: Black conceals, white reveals. What it’s referring to though is the layer UNDERNEATH! Black will hide the layer underneath, white will let it show. You’ll notice that your Color Picker is now set to black and white. While you’re removing parts of your object, you can toggle between removing and replacing by clicking the X key. Okay, on to removing the top line of text. My foreground colour is white and the layer underneath is temporarily turned off. I’ll turn it on and off to check my work a couple of times while I’m removing.

Here you can see that the lower layer is on, and the backwards text on the top line is gone. In its place is a line of text going the right way.

Now I’ve removed both lines of backwards text.

With both card layers you can see I’ve successfully turned the deer and birds around. To incorporate the Layer Mask with the top layer, right-click on the layer and choose Simplify Layer. This step isn’t completely necessary in this instance because when I Merge the two cards in the next step, the Layer Mask will automatically be Simplified. But if I wasn’t Merging layers, I would definitely want to Simplify that object layer.

To make it easy to use the modified card, I’ll select the two card layers (Click>Shift>Click) then right-click and choose Merge Layers. The keyboard shortcut is CTRL/CMD>E. And that’s it! You can’t even see where I’ve made the changes. (If you look closely though, you can see there’s a little nibble taken out of the bottom line of text at the lower swirly part of the N in Nature.)

I think this will give us some more options with our kits. I have some great ideas for upcoming tutorials that will be more complex than this one. Stay tuned!

PDF Version : https://bit.ly/3DRkm8M

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

October 25, 2022 by Jan

Quick Trick: Brighter Photos the Easy Way

PDF Version : https://bit.ly/3DTBCdq

I know this is true. We ALL have photos that we like but would like better if… they were more vivid. But making adjustments to lighting and colour can be time-consuming and takes some practice. I’m going to show you how to take a nice photo to a NICE photo with just a couple of clicks. I’ve tried this trick on a lot of photos and am really impressed, as well as disappointed I didn’t know about it sooner! The photo I’m going to use as my demo is one taken by my friend Sandy and I’m using it with her permission.

Fall is all about colour. These leaves are pretty, but they’re just a little insipid.

I haven’t really shown you too much under the Quick Edit tab, and that’s my bad. There are some pretty useful options in here and I strongly recommend playing with them when you have a few minutes. Today we’ll focus on the Color tab.

Click on that Vibrance option. This menu will open up. Notice the blue box around the “Free” space in the tic-tac-toe array. That’s the unaltered image. You can use the slider to adjust the colour vibrance or just click on one of the boxes. You can see the adjustments without actually committing to one by rolling the cursor over the array. Going up decreases the vibrance, going down increases it.

Each of the presets represents a 25% change in Vibrance. I’ll show you each of them.

With this laptop, I often struggle with getting the screenshots I want with the pop-up boxes open. Sometimes I luck out, sometimes I fail. Most times I fail – screenshots are captured by clicking CTRL>prt sc and as soon as I hit the CTRL key the pop-up disappears. SO frustrating!! Anyway, that’s what captions and text are for. This image is a 50% increase adjustment.

And on to 75%. Are you able to see the changes?

100% looks like this. Not only are the leaves brighter and more vivid, the fallen log under them has greater dimension and the whole image is just better. If you’ve gone to 100% and still think your image needs a boost, Save it with a new name then run the process again on the new version. When you’re happy with the way it looks, click on the Expert tab and you’re done, ready to use your bright, vivid photo on a layout! You can run through this process in the middle of a layout if you decide the photo needs some oomph. Moving between Expert and Quick won’t wreck anything, so give it a whirl!

Here are the original and the new-and-improved version. Impressive, right? And so easy…

PDF Version : https://bit.ly/3DTBCdq

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Individual Style)

October 18, 2022 by Jan

Challenge Spotlight: Minikit

Hey GingerScrappers! It’s time for another Challenge Spotlight. This month I’m going to take you through the October Minikit Challenge Gallery. This challenge is hosted by the Polka Dot Chicks, Tammy and Shelby. The Challenge revolves around a minikit they design and provide to participants at no cost. Participants can use all of the kit, or only part of it, and are allowed to use a template. Here’s a look at the October kit, which coordinates with this month’s Buffet colour palette.

Let’s have a look at the layouts that have been posted up to now. The layouts are in the order they were posted to the Gallery and are linked through the member’s user name so you can pop into the Gallery and leave them some praise, if you should so desire.

First up is sparky_mom with a special event announcement. She’d used the entire kit, tucking part of the wavy string under her photo strip and using the large circles on her background as journaling blanks. Congratulations, family!

NHSoxGirl went minimalist with her layout, using the paper with the huge circles as a border for her large-and-in-charge photo.

Alasandra has used the whole kit, with a large-circle paper divider and the paper with the triangles on it cut in triangles to repeat a theme.

MarilynZ has added a word cloud, a soccer ball flair and a silhouette to her minikit. She slightly recoloured the photostrip. Using the large-circle paper as her background compliments the soccer theme.

The big-circle paper is pretty popular! Branma has it in her background too. She’s created a sweet little cluster with the flower elements and anchored her photos with the brads. Cute pup!

AnnieA has a cute series of photos in her photo strip. She’s used everything, with the big-circle paper forming more of a border around the tiny-heart paper. The cluster in the centre ensures the eye goes right to the photos.

I LOVE dhariana‘s use of white space here. I can see she resized the papers, adding a border mask to the tiny-heart paper in the background. There’s only a single photo, and every piece of the kit is visible. Very pretty!

The only part of the kit fontaine didn’t use was the paper with the triangles on it. She recoloured the photo strips and used them as ephemera, using the Paint Bucket to fill her background with the russet colour from one of the big circles. And her photo is masked so it spills over onto the paper behind it.

I so admire people who can use bold prints like these with such great results. Big, bold prints scare me! But not willow… she’s used them very nicely here, and turned one of the circles into a frame for her title.

PixyGirl has used it all, cutting the sides of the photo strip off, recolouring them yellow and using them as paper strips to anchor her photos. The photo strip makes another appearance, but separated into three independent frames.

I’ve never seen this effect jenazs has created before. It looks as though she’s turned her elements into overlays, allowing the papers’ patterns to show through. She has recoloured some of the flower elements with colours pulled from the papers and her photos and turned the brads into flair. Very interesting.

There’s a good amount of white space in this layout by mum23ms. She’s added some ricrac (maybe created using one of our tutorials?) and some splotchy paint behind her photo cluster. She clipped the big-circle paper to the photo strip – it took me several looks at it to figure that out!

Last but not least, we have this very inventive layout from Tbear. She’s used the whole kit, but in some unusual ways. The triangle paper has been snipped into tiny triangles, and scattered like confetti with some super-shrunken brads. The twine has been turned into stems for the flowers. The tiny heart paper has been desaturated somewhat and the big spot paper has been made smaller, duplicated and laid end-to-end to create a border along the bottom. I think this is my favourite of them all.

The first half of October has been unusually summery here in the Okanagan valley. But I see the forecast is showing a sudden descent into much chillier weather, bringing rain with it. I’m actually looking forward to it!

How many of last week’s fonts did you download? I picked up 14 of them! See you next week with a Quick Trick.

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Challenge Spotlight, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, GingerBread Ladies, Spotlight Challenge, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Fonts)

October 11, 2022 by Jan

October-y Fonts

PDF VERSION : https://bit.ly/3MB8f2u

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…

PDF VERSION : https://bit.ly/3MB8f2u

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, Fantastic Fonts, Tutorials Tagged With: Tutorial Tuesday

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

October 4, 2022 by Jan

Curvy Lines/Borders Method #2

PDF VERSION : https://bit.ly/3gdizBK

Hey ladies! I’m running behind today after being awake half the night, so this might break a bit late. I’ll be trying my darnedest to get it out on time. Today I’m going to show you another method for curved lines/borders using Photoshop Elements. This one is pretty easy, but there are a few steps.

Open up a new canvas on your workspace. Then choose the Custom Shapes Tool. The border I’ll make will have 4 layers, all created with the exact same Shape but looking quite different. [Editor’s note: Jan started out using Arrow 17 but didn’t like how it was turning out. The tutorial uses Arrow 14.]

To make a bit less work for us, I set a Fixed Size for the arrow Shape. I went with 12 in for the Width and 4 in for the Height. The easiest way to make sure the Shape ends up actually ON the canvas is to click along the left edge. Note that heavy outline on the Shape; that signifies that the Shape is a Smart Object. To do any of the following steps with it, it needs to be Simplified. If you’re working with Version 15 or newer, you’ll have a Simplify button right there with the Tool Options.

If you don’t see that button, right-click on the layer in the Layers Panel and choose Simplify Layer from the dropdown menu.

Now to dispense with the pointy part. Drag out a box around it with the Rectangular Marquee Tool.

Now, Edit>Cut or CTRL (Windows)/CMD (Mac)>X.

If you’re making waves and not a side border, you can skip this part.

These steps that follow are all subject to interpretation – they’re examples that show you HOW to make alterations, not orders!! Here I’ve Resized the curvy shape and Constrained Proportions so it looked exactly the same as before, only it extends from top edge to bottom edge.

If you want to make your curvy shape into a Clipping Mask, it may be necessary to fill in one side of the curvy part. Drag out a box with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, making sure the edge on the side you want to keep curvy doesn’t extend too far. Otherwise those nice swoops will get squared off.

Then just dump the Paint Bucket into the space!

To get rid of the box outline, Select>Deselect or CTRL/CMD>D.

This is just housekeeping.

The preceding steps will be repeated for each of the variations to follow. Turn off the finished layer’s Visiblity, change colours and let’s make another curve. I changed the Height to 5 in for this one. the curves come out a little tighter.

Rather than just Resizing it, I’m going to use the Image>Transform>Skew menu. In this option, only the corner ‘handles’ are active. You can move them horizontally or vertically.

Like this…

Then I stretched it top-to-bottom (NOT Constrained) so the left edge runs the full 12 in. This also changes the curve a bit.

Here’s how the first two layers look together.

Same shape, slightly different dimensions, very different look!

After beheading the arrow, I stretched the curve across the canvas. But it’s not different enough from the previous two, so…

I made a Copy layer: right-click>Duplicate Layer>OK or CTRL/CMD>J.

I moved one Copy so that it overlapped and aligned with the other Copy. Then the two layers need to be combined into one by Merging. Either activate both layers by click>SHIFT>clicking on them, right-click>Merge Layers… or CTRL/CMD>E. The Merged curvy shape extends off the canvas, but I’ll show you something that’ll help with that.

To see the whole extended curvy shape, Image>Resize>Reveal All. Boom!

Here you can see that my extended curvy shape is about 18 1/4 inches long.

Now let’s change the way the curves look. This time let’s use Image>Transform>Distort.

Distort has a lot more opportunities for weird. Each of the handles is active and can be moved horizontally, vertically and laterally until you see something you like.

All three shapes are visible now and I can move them around until I have a chartreuse curve I like. Once I’d made my choice, I went to the Crop Tool, set the size to 12×12 and Cropped the canvas.