Club Scrap Blog Hop - June 2015 - National Parks

This month I thought I would do something completely different.  I know that many of us are into art journalling and that so many of the books that we make lend themselves to this totally freeing art form, so we are going to make a digital art journal page here.  

Of course page size does not matter so whatever canvas size you are comfortable with works for art journalling.  Most people like to use bigger pages but for this blog I decided to make a slightly smaller page.

As always, open a new blank page on a transparent background.

I chose 8" wide x 10" high.

Now open up a bunch of papers, elements, stamps etc.  and start on your creative journey to build your page.  Art journalling has no recipe, it is all to do with how you feel.

Now it is time to make a start on building my art journalling page.  At this point I have absolutely not idea what direction this will take.

So now I have a background in place and have overlayed it with a CS Texture from 2010.  You can find Volume 1 in the digital store.

Here you can see that I have started building up my background using various papers, textures and layer styles.  You can really get some super depth by playing around with the various styles and filters that come with photoshop.

Now you can see the page building up.  Also I will be rotating it to landscape soon.

I decided to rotate clockwise.

Continue to build until you are happy with what you have.  Here is my final page.  Most of what I used came from the National Parks kit and I also used some elements from my stash.

I do hope that you have enjoyed my little creative journey.

Your next stop on the hop is:

http://shonascraps.blogspot.com/2015/06/MogramCards.html

Club Scrap Blog Hop May 2015 - The Blues

First I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to leave me a bit of love.  Your comments mean  the world to me.

Now I would like to get into my post for this month.  Many of you have probably seen a lot of layouts from me in our gallery.  That's because I really like this kit.

Anyway this month I thought I would do a variation on a time-honored process.  Years and years ago we used to have sepia photos in our albums.  What I am going to show you is how to do a digital cyanotype.  

I found this photo in my stash.  In this case, I chose a photo that is black and white but if you choose a color photo you can very easily convert it to black and white.

To make the photo a cyanotype, go to Image>Adjustments>hue and saturation and hit enter.

At this point you will see a new dialog box at the top of which is a drop down box saying preset: default.  Click on the down facing arrow and select cyanotype.  Hit OK.

Now you have a cyanotype photo to work with.  Here you can see I have already put my cyanotype photo

onto the layout I am going to build.  Now you can go ahead and select papers and elements and other things that you are going to use to build your layout.  In this case, I want to use a mask beneath the photo.

Here I have selected a mask from my stash and placed it over the photo.

Now it is placed where I want and resized.  Move the mask to below the photo and select the photo.  Go to the layer menu and select create clipping mask and hit enter.  You now have your masked cyanotype.

I always do a merge down here so that the photo does not become detached from the mask if I want to change the order of layers in the stack.  Here I have selected and placed the background I want to use and resized the photo so that it fits across the width of the paper.

I have added a bow and a sprig of leaves and have selected a stamp to use.  I have made the stamp into a brush by selecting it and going to the edit menu and going to define brush preset.

And now for the final layout.

I do hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and my final layout.

Your next stop is:

http://carpe-memoria.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-blues-blog-hop.html

Club Scrap Blog Hop April 2015 Botanicals

Well here we are again and what an absolutely lovely kit for the month of April.  The colors are so appropriate for April - what with the beginning of spring and Easter and Mother's day coming up.  As soon as I saw the first spoiler for this kit I absolutely knew what I was going to do for my blog post.

Of course in the middle of preparing my notes I did the Shatterproof challenge and made some layouts using this wonderful Botanicals kit.  Here is just one.

The rest of them have been posted in my gallery in the Club Scrap Forum and on Facebook.

Anyway, enough of that - here is what we are doing this month.  I figured that this topic had not really be visited in the past.

Negative Space!

or 

White Space!

What both refer to are areas on your layout which do not have anything in them.  It does not have to be white but what is important is the arrangement of your photos/elements/text etc. 

As a design factor, negative space is used to add symmetry to your layout to make it look clean and natural.  Negative or White space should be used to align or balance elemental objects to make them look more pleasing.

Here is an example.

Generally speaking the design factor is not really important to me when I digi or paper scrap.  I tend to go with what feels good probably looks good and of course, with digi scrapping you can always delete!

So now we are going to construct a layout using the Botanicals kit.  I am off to find a photo now.

Here it is!

Open a new blank 12" x 12" document with a transparent backgound at 300 ppi.

You could use the rule of thirds for making negative space layouts and get really technical about it but I tend to go with my gut and put the focal photo somewhere off center and build from there.  You will see in the next photo that I have decided to use a mask for this photo.

I felt at this point that I would build a quick template to use here.  So here is what I have so far.

It is already coming together quite well.  Now I have added the photo and a couple of additional elements to the template.

Now the time has come to experiment with background paper to see what will work with this.  After much trial and error I found that the lovely pink worked well so here it is with the paper added!

Now for a little embellishment and a few words.

And here is the final layout.

I do hope you like what I have done with negative space and will play around with this on your own.  

Your next stop on the hop is:

http://shonascraps.blogspot.com/2015/04/BotanicalsBloghop.html

Club Scrap Blog Hop March 2015 - 50s Kitchen

It's that time of the month again but before we get started I wanted to thank all of you for the comments and love you have left me.  It really does mean a lot to me.

Anyway, today I thought we could take a look Making a Silhouette!

There are lots of different ways to make silhouettes but I think this method is probably the easiest. First you have to select a suitable photograph and desaturate it.  When selecting the photograph, find one that has some contrast but not too much fine detail.  Here is the photo I have chosen prior to doing the desaturation.

You will see that this image is "almost" a silhouette already!  Also to do the desaturisation go to Image>adjustments>desaturise.  Hit enter and you get this!

At this point I applied a levels adjustment layer to give a tad more contrast.

Concentrate on the silhouette shape you want to keep and do not worry about the background.  The background stuff can be erased later.  You just have to make sure that you have a fairly clean outline to select.

You can see that the girl is actually sitting on a rocky precipice and I am going to select the girl with the rocky outcropping.  Use the quick selection tool to select the silhouette.

Here you can see that I have made the selection.

Duplicate the selection once you have the marching ants by using controlJ.

Here you can see that I have 4 layers.  The original photo turned off.  A copy of the original photo desaturated.  The photo with an applied levels mask on it and the selected silhouette portion.  Now you can tidy up around your selection.  You can see that I have some "hairy" bits in various places and I am going ahead to tidy those up.  To do this you can use a variety of ways.  I have chosen to a hard edge brush as an eraser.

Now you have to fill the silhouette with black.  To do this press D so the foreground color is default black, fill the shape and then copy the black shape to a new transparent background and save it as a png on a transparent background.

You are now ready to start playing!

Here is what I came up with. 

I do hope you enjoy my blog post this month.

Your next stop is: http://debduzscrappin.blogspot.com/2015/03/50s-kitchen-blog-hop.html

February 2015 Club Scrap Blog Hop - London Calling

Good morning everyone

Back on 1st February I was totally into the idea of downloading this kit but like many of you, my download kit pointed to Constellations!  Needless to say, I did not have to wait too long for this glitch to be fixed and want to give Julie a shout out for being on top of this for all of us.

Anyway, I downloaded the kit and ended up having all kinds of problems installing it so I have only just managed to get it all installed to take a look.  All I can now say is Wow!

So now what do I do with all this loveliness?

I thought it would be a good idea to revisit using masks in a creative way and what did I see - we got an absolutely gorgeous mask in London Calling.

Now for a photo.  

You can see that I have played around a bit with the photo and that the orientation of the photo is somewhat different than that of the mask.  Never fear.  All will work out.

Bring the photo onto the mask and create a clipping mask.  Add a stroke frame - in this case white around the photo.

Now open up your London Calling papers.  Chose one that you feel will work with your photo and place it under the photo but above the clipping mask.  Make the clipping mask and here you will see that I have changed the paper completely.

To do what you see go to the image menu and match color - you can then play around with the sliders until you get something that you like and hit ok.  Once done you will have something like what you see above.  At this point, merge your visible layers in order to preserve the transparent background.

Open a new file 12" x 12" on a transparent background at 300 ppi.

Bring in your merged photo and mask and close out the original.

Add a background beneath the photo/mask layer.  In this case I have darkened the background considerably to make the photo/mask layer pop.

Now you can have all kinds of fun playing with stamps and embellishment to complete the layout.

Here is my completed layout.

I hope you have enjoyed the process today and will come back to my blog again.  Your next stop is:

http://debduzscrappin.blogspot.com/2015/02/london-calling-blog-hop.html

Club Scrap Valentines Blog Hop

Hello everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day to you all.

Many of you know that it is not only this very special romantic day but it is also my wedding anniversary.  So I thought it would be apposite to dig into my photo archives and work up a layout with one of my own wedding photos.

First off, open a new blank 12" x 12" document.  I always do this with a transparent background at 300ppi.

For the background, I have selected papers from 2011 LoveInk and 2012 LoveBlooms and blended three of them together.

Once blended, I have added a stamp from my stash.

Opened a photo from my own wedding and overlayed this photo on top of the stamp and created a clipping mask.

Then I went back into my wedding photos and found one that I felt would work with the layout I was creating.  Also I went to see what extras I could find to use and found a perfect cluster from Love Blooms.

Added the photo behind the cluster and erased the excess.

Added some brushed hearts to the background layer and here is the final layout.

I do hope you have enjoyed this very simple and quick layout.  Your next stop is:

http://debduzscrappin.blogspot.com/2015/02/valentines-day-blog-hop-i-love-canvas.html

Club Scrap Blog Hop January 2015 - Constellations

Happy New Year everyone.  I do hope that you all had an amazing holiday and are ready to get started crafting again.

So lets get started right away with Constellations.  I thought it would be cool to "cartoonize" a photo for a layout with this kit.

First open up a new file 12" x 12" at 300 ppi and transparent background.  Then find a photo that you would like to use and open that up too.

I am hoping that Tricia, Brenda, Kay and Karen will not mind me using this cute photo of the four of them which I found the other day!

Anyway, drag the photo onto the blank layout and close the original.

With most photos you will want to increase the overall contrast; go to Image>Adjustment>levels and using the input levels sliders, adjust to your liking.  For this I used 25 for the black, 1.13 for the grey and 220 for the white.

You want to end up with a strong contrast but not too dark.

Now we are going to add some film grain to the photo.  Go to Filters>Filter gallery>artistic>film grain.  For this I used grain at 5, highlight area at 0 and intensity at 10.  Hit OK.  Then duplicate the layer twice.

Rename the second layer to Screen and use the blend mode of screen also.

Rename the third layer halftone and apply a half tone pattern to this layer.  Go to Filter>Pixellate>Color halftone

Set the max radius to 4 and leave everything else at default and hit OK.  Set the blend mode of the third layer to darken and hit ok.

Here you can see that the graininess of a newspaper cartoon has magically happened.

Now go to layers>merge visible and you have your cartoonized photo ready to be used in a layout.

I added a stroke to the outside of the photo also.

Now for the completed layout using this cartoonized photo.  I used two papers, an embellishment overlay and stamp from Constellations.  The balloon came from Comics.

I do hope you like what I have done here and will consider using cartoonization in the future.  If your photo is not quite what you expected or is slightly blurry this is a wonderful solution to enable you to use it.

Your next stop is:

http://debduzscrappin.blogspot.com/