Anyway, I went ahead and opened the entire contents of this luscious kit.
Now off the find a photo and also decide what I would like to share with you all today. Ok found a photo. I took this while traipsing around in the back of beyond a while back. I really have no idea why I shot this photo but I believe it to be a cottage that was once home to someone.
I can quite imagine living in a cottage like this but in this day and age it would be essential to have at least an internet connection!
Now for what this blog post is going to be about.
You probably have all noticed that I do very little journalling. I like to try and make my layouts use the wonderful stamps which we get in our kits; occasionally use the alphas (of which I have thousands), and use word art from other sources. One of the things that I really need to get better at is journalling using the many fonts which I have installed on my computer and using the fonts which Tricia suggests in the blog which will work with the kit contents. For this beautiful kit, she suggests using Cinzel which is a free download but I already have it in my font repertoire.
Now to get cracking.
Open up a new 12" x 12" blank canvas on a trasparent background at 300ppi. This is very easy for me in Photoshop CC as I have a premade one click version. I also always use the option to make my canvas fit on my screen. That gives me plenty of real estate to play with.
Here - because of the shape of the photo above, I have decided to use two of the printed papers to create my background.
Now I am going to bring in my photo. I really like the grey and white border strip in the kit so I have brought that into my layout as well.
Here you can see that I have rotated and duplicated and merged the strip to make it go all the way across my canvas and given it a drop shadow for dimension.
Now for some text. Make a text box and choose the Cinzel font at a size that will be big enough to read once the layout is complete and you print it out. In this case, I am starting at 24 pts to see if it can be read. Also I have chosen to place my text on the photo and reverse the color so it appears white. At the same time, I have opened the dialog box for characters and I actually chose the Cinzel Decorative font. Now to start journalling.
You can see that my journalling is overlapping on each line so I am going to have to play around quite a lot to make it fit into the journalling box. This means that the leading (or vertical spacing) is going to be tweaked quite a lot. To do that look at the character dialog box.
There is a box on the right of that dialog box that has a double headed arrow pointing up and down. At the moment it is set at 14pts.
To change the line spacing for this journalling, I have to increase the points between each line. The next screen will show you the leading at 24 pts and you can see the third paragraph dropping off the photo. Don't worry - we will fix that too.
I do hope you can see the three lines of text of the third paragraph below the photo.
OK, to fix that there are a number of different things you can do. The easiest and fastest way to do this is the select your text box, then go to the edit menu>transform>scale and using the shift key to keep aspect ratio - just resize.
At this point, I also moved the entire paragraph a scosh to the left before committing to the change.
I don't know if you can see this, but the in the third line of the first paragraph, the word "wooded" has both the 'o's crossing over each other. To fix this, we need to kern the text a bit. To do this makes use of the same character and dialog box. Just above where you see the color of the text there is a VA with a double headed arrow beneath it. Currently it is set to 0 but if you left click it, you will see a number of options available. With this font at this size, I have set this at 100.
Immediately to the left of the VA adjustment control, there is a control which says V/A with a left facing arrow beneath it. Click that and turn that control to optical. Since the text seems to get a little lost in the photo, I changed it to a bold version of Cinzel Decorative using the top right control in the same dialog box.
At this point, you can play around with layer styles and drop shadows and other filters.
Now for embellishments and finishing off the layout. You will see that I have played quite a lot with rectangular elements in this layout.
Here it is finished off.
I do hope you have all enjoyed the creative process again and have learned a little about leading and kerning.
