Club Scrap Blog Hop - November 2015 Moroccan Spice

Hello everyone

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has left me a comment on my blog.  You all mean so much to me and I always get so encouraged when you leave me a bit of love.

Also, it seems to be that time of year again.  The holidays are fast approaching and if you are anything like me, nothing seems to be ready for Thanksgiving let alone Christmas.  Anyway, when I first downloaded and saw the new and wonderful Moroccan Spice kit, I immediately thought of the wool dyers market in Marrakesh and made a layout for one of the forum challenges.

That in turn prompted an idea which revolves around the mask that we received in the kit.  As usual, open up a new document in photoshop with a transparent background and 300 ppi at 12" x 12".  Then open up the mask that came with the kit.

As an aside here, masks are extremely useful.  No only can you use them for attaching things to in your layout or card or other project, you can convert them into brushes as well which can then be used as erasers.  In this case we are going to play around with the mask and one or two of the extras.

Go ahead and open up the extras that came with the kit.  We are going to use the top black shapes with their corresponding frames.  Both of these goodies will be resized to make the layout work when we add photos to it.  Once you have selected the top black shapes make them into a brush by going to the edit menu and selected define brush preset.

Now we can select the first photo to use in our layout and "clip"it to the mask.  Once that is done we can add a couple of papers and what we are going to do is erase part of the mask layer and part of the top background paper layer to create a "hole.  Actually we made more than one "hole".  Having made the shapes into a brush, I used them as an eraser to make 3 pairs of holes of varying sizes.

The photos I am using are of Finley and her dad in the midst of halloween shopping and a wonderful father daughter hike in the forest.  All the photos are now in place and I have applied a very small inner shadow layer style to the paper layer that is visible.

Now select the dotted frame pair that matches the shapes you used to make the "holes" for the photos.

I use the regular lasso tool to make the selection.  Also note that these are overlays so there is some color inside each of the shapes.

Next you are going to go to edit>copy and then back to your layout.  You will need to resize this overlay each time you use it on your layout.

Also it is important that you make a new layer each time you are going to use this frame overlay.  Once you have all your frame overlays in place you can go ahead and make a brush preset of each of the original shapes that were used to erase the centers of each of the frame overlays.

The layout is almost complete.  Now is the time to select embellishments and maybe a stamp or two.  This turned into a much more complicated layout than when I originally thought about what I wanted to do.  You probably all noticed that I had two background papers  in the original.  I decided that one was enough particularly since I was using a lot of photos for this layout.

I hope you have enjoyed this visual journey and will come back time and again to see what I have been up to.  Here is the final layout in all its glory!

Your next stop is:

http://carpe-memoria.blogspot.com/2015/11/moroccan-spice-blog-hop.html