Fire and Ice - Club Scrap Blog Hop

For the blog hop this month I thought I would show you all how to make composite brushes from several elements.

Step 1:  Move all the elements you are going to be using onto a single transparent .png.

Step 2: Move all the elements close to or overlapping one another - you can rotate, resize etc at this point until you have something that pleases you.  Here is mine:

Step 3:  At this point you will apply a mask to every layer in your composition.  The default mask will be white and a little rule you may like to commit to memory is black conceals, white reveals.  So working on each mask with a black brush you can "hide" parts of each image that you do not wish to see in your finished stamp.

Here is a photo of my slightly changed composite.

I am sure you cannot see too much difference here.  If you want a more distressed look you can of course change the size and type of brush you use and change the opacity as well.

Step 4:  You are now ready to make all your layers into a single layer.  The best way to do that is highlight the topmost layer and hit shift+control+alt+e which will create a new layer with the merged image.  (you also need to turn off your base layer if it is not transparent).

Step 5:  Working on the merged image layer place your cursor in the layer in your layers palette and do control+left click and that should give you marching ants around your merged image.

Step 6:  To make the brush - with the marching ants visible go to edit>define brush preset and a new dialog box appears.    Give the new brush a name and hit OK or save and you are done.

Below is a layout I made with the brush I created.

Enjoy.

Your next stop will be:

http://clubscrapcreates.blogspot.com/ 

Turning a black and white stamp into a color masterpiece

Hello everyone.

Yesterday Norma asked a question in the forum so I thought I would answer it here in the form of a quick tutorial.

First get your base image.

Then find the paper you would like to use as an overlay.  In this case one of the wonderful colored papers from the fire and ice kit.

In order to make the final graphic you will need to resize the paper you use as an overlay.  I resized it to 4" x 4".  To resize go to Image>Image size and new dialog box appears.  You can then specify the size and hit OK or enter.  

At this point you should have two windows open in your workspace.  The stamp graphic and resized paper.  Simply drag the resized paper onto the stamp graphic.  You will be able to move it around until you have it in your desired position.  Once you have it located where you want it go to the layers palette to make sure you have the stamp graphic and the resized paper stacked with the paper on top.

Then to make your colorful graphic go to the layers menu>create clipping mask and magically your colored graphic appears.  You are still on a transparent background here so the preserve the transparency go to the layer menu and select merge down or merge visible and then save as a png.

Now you can go ahead and use your multicolored graphic on a layout or card as I have done below.

I hope you find this useful.