CS Blog Hop May 2017 - Adirondacks

Hello Everyone

Time is flying by this year.  Not only am I now on restricted activity as a result of some additional dental surgery, but all my house and landscaping activities are at a stop.  That means I have some extra time to write my blog post this month.

Today is Mother's Day so even though you are all reading this later in the month, I wanted to wish you all a happy day.

Anyway, I am not too sure what I want to show you with this kit so I just went ahead and opened a new 12" x 12" blank canvas at 300ppi and then all the elements and papers etc. from the new Adirondacks kit.

I also opened this photo which I shot at our local Cracker Barrel a few weeks ago.  I am guessing that all these soft drinks come from different parts of the United States.  Anyway, I thought that this may make a good starting point with the new kit.

Now you can see that I have decided to make this photo shape a rounded rectangle using the tool for that and adjusting the radius of each corner to 50 pixels.

I think that we as digital scrapbookers do not use rounded corners often enough and that is why I decided to use them for my layout today.

Now I am going to choose my background and bring it in behind the photo. I have also added a cut out and put a stroke and drop shadow on both of these elements of my layout.

I really want to play some more with the background now.  So I have added another layer and used the blue wood grain background and blended it using a hard light blend mode at 59%.

And now I am off the look at the stamps to see what else I can do here.  The map stamp seemed to make sense so I made a brush preset with it and added another layer, increased the size of the brush so that the entire screen could be stamped.  Applied the stamp and used a gradient overlay preset to come up with this.

To me this layout seems a little naked so I am going to make some kind of embellishment cluster up. In order to do that I am going to make a template which I can re-use with different kits if I want to. It is very straight-forward to do.  Open up a new blank canvas at 12"x 12" with transparent background at 300 ppi.

I actually keep a file of ALL template components separated just in case I need to make up a cluster embellishment.  this is what I have come up with.

You can see from the above that I have made a layered template (no layer styles) which I am going to use.  When I started working on this I simplified the cluster and this is what I came up with.  I used colors that either came from within the kit or within the photo.  Merge the visible layers in order to preserve the transparent background and make a new layer in the layout and drag in the cluster.

And here is the end product.  I do hope you have enjoyed the creative process.