CS Blog Hop January 2018 - Surprise

And surprise it was when I got my download email on January 1st!!!

Happy New Year everyone.

I got up on New Years Day hoping that my download email would be in my inbox and there it was.  Of course, I downloaded, unzipped and installed and when I opened everything up, I was blown away by the vibrancy of this wonderful new kit.  Of course, it was even more vibrant than Kay's "surprise" spoiler and even more so since I have spent a lot of time playing with A Night at the Met!  More on that kit later on.

Anyway, after playing around with Surprise and doing all of the current challenges except the project use it one for January, I decided to write my blog post.  So here we are on 4th January and it is freezing in south Florida so I am bundled up in my art cave writing my post.

First of all I was looking at the stamp images that come in the digital kit and decided to open up this sheet and take a close look.

There on the right center there is a stamp with 3 parcels.  That is the stamp I am going to play around with.

Here it is on its own transparent background.

You may be wondering what I am going to do with it - let me show you.  Many of you know that Taryn Cornelius has given permission for me to use some of the wedding photos from her daughter Shay's wedding last October in the New York Botanical Gardens.  In fact, you have probably seen a bunch of layouts appearing in the forum and on Facebook.  This is going to be another.

I have selected a photo and layered it above the stamp.

What happens now is a bit of magic within photoshop.  Go to Layers>createclippingmask>enter.  This is what you see!

Now for some tidying up before creating a full layout.  You can see that the photo has partially obliterated the left and right parcels of the stamp and also the bow at the top of the center parcel.  I am going to remove the parts of the photo that are superfluous by using the edit>cut function after selecting those parts to be removed.  The hardest part of the photo to remove is the bow so I used the lasso tool to select that part of the photo.

Now the stamp is beginning to evolve into a usable component for a layout.  Here you can see that I have created a balloon on a string and added a copied ribbon bow to the top of the center gift!  Not sure if I am happy with that but ... we shall see.

Ok - this has now evolved.  I did not like the bow on top of the center gift so created some balloons on strings instead.

Now I think I can proceed.  I opened up the quad print and selected colors for the balloons from within the quad print.  To make the balloons those colors I created 3 further layers and used the paint bucket tool to flood each of those layers and made clipping masks as shown above.  This is where we are at.  At this point, I think it is necessary to add some layer styles to give this some dimension.  Also it is time to create a new 12" x 12" on transparent background at 300ppi document and start building the final layout.

So I spent a quite a while playing around with building this layout.  I got rid of the left and right side gifts completely.  Added a bunch of additional different sized balloons and added a recolored background and word stamp and ended up with this as the final layout.

I do hope you like what I have done here.  Please enjoy the entire blog hop and again Happy New Year.

Making Quad Prints

Hello all

Adeline Brill has requested a quick tutorial on how to make quadprints from your digi stash.

Here you are.

First off open up a new blank document 8.5" x 11" at 300 ppi on a transparent background.

Then open up the backgrounds that you want to use.

In this case I have chosen backgrounds from Artifacts and Celebrate.

Here I am starting with a background for Celebrate. 

All you need to do now is select a piece of it 4.5" x 5.5" go to the edit menu and select copy, then go to your  blank document, use the edit menu and select paste and voila!

Do this for the remaining backgrounds and you will have a quad print.  Of course you will need to move the backgrounds into their respective places.  Note that I have put each selection on its own layer just in case I want to change something later on.  You can save this if you wish and print directly on 8.5" x 11" stock.

If you have a large format printer you can do the same by selecting pieces of backgrounds that are 6" square and arranging them in a similar fashion.

I hope this tutorial helps.