CS Blog Hop June 2016 - Boardwalk

Every time I hear or see the word Boardwalk, I think of Bruce Willis and his wonderful rendition of Under the Boardwalk.  So today, I am digging around in my archive photos for a special photo to use for my layout this month.

Here is the photo I am going to use.

As usual, open up a new file, 12" x 12" on a transparent background at 300 ppi.

Now open up everything Boardwalk.  I do this in my Adobe Bridge which is a great filing system for all my digital kits, goodies and components.

As you can see, we get lots of fun things to play with.  I have already started building my layout using my "Under the Boardwalk" photo.

I hope you agree that this photo really lends itself well to the colors of this kit.  As yet I have not added or applied any layer styles or other goodies to my page under construction.

Here is the next stopping point.  I have used brushes created from the overlay extras and erased some of the frame work and background papers and then "painted" using varying sizes of the same brush at different opacities and different sizes to create the idea of the beach overflowing from the photo.

Also added the cute side by side deckchairs and umbrellas and a stamp made from the stamp sheet. You will still note that the only thing that has a layer style so far is the deckchairs graphic.  Now I have gone ahead and added layer styles to all the layers apart from the side by side deck chairs.  Outer glow is what I used but at  lower opacity than 100% and not too big either.

I did add a couple of layers of brush work and added some texture and here is the finished product.  I hope you all like what has happened here.

Happy July everyone and enjoy fireworks day!

Club Scrap Blog Hop May 2016 - Creative License

May Day came and went without a flurry of activity here except for the arrival of my digital kit from Club Scrap.  Who can resist playing with a new set of digital toys the moment they arrive?  So I did the two page layout of the month challenge and posted in the forum via a fairly circuitous route, assisted by none other than our very own Julie.  So here is a shout out to you Julie.  Thank you very much for your help and on a Sunday as well!

So when this arrived yesterday, of course, I downloaded and installed and opened everything up in my Adobe Bridge.

What an absolutely gorgeous array of goodies and what a wonderful color palette.  Since today is only 2nd May, I have no clue yet what I would like to share with you all so I am going to put my thinking cap on and come back on another day to complete a digital project.

Now it is 17th May and I am two dental surgeries later.  Time to actually write my blog post for this month!

First off when I reopened my bridge only the alphas and stamps came up so I cut out one of the stamps and made a brush with it.

To make the brush, select the stamp you want, go to edit>define brush preset and you have your brush.  Now on to open the papers and embellies and other goodies that came with our kits.  At the same time as opening everything in our kit, I went off in search of a photo and found this of my friend David with a close friend of his in Australia.

So now I think I have everything that I need to make up a new page.

Ok - I chose my background and a simple embellishment and photo and this is what I have so far.

This is such a happy photo!

At this point, I have selected the brush preset that I made earlier and am going to use it as an eraser.

I brushed the stamp as an eraser on the aqua background paper and as a result have revealed another background paper beneath.

Also used a layer style to "extrude" the lower background paper through the aqua paper.  Now all I need to do is sort out a style for the photo.

All I did was add a soft drop shadow and an 8 point white stroke to the photo and there you have it.   This is a really simple and quick layout and I think the simplicity really makes this photo pop out.

Thank you for visiting my blog today.

CS Blog Hop April 2016 - Dahlia

This month I was somewhat taken aback by the beautiful artwork that was created for the Dahlia kit. Normally I do not go for water color type flowers but this kit is really lovely particularly because of the colors used.

That being said, I am not entirely sure that I am going to use this extremely vibrant color palette. Today is 6th April and I have been thinking about this month's NBUS challenge a lot.  Pam is asking us to use a stamp or stencil that makes us think of rain.

Open up a new blank 12" x 12" canvas at 300ppi on a transparent background.

I actually have several photos which I shot in Venice while it was raining so thought to use one or two of them for this challenge.

Open up your background and in this case I have recolored the chosen one to a more green hue to almost mimic a rainy and stormy feel.

Of course you can tweak it to your hearts content using the eyedropper tool.  This is what I ended up with.

I think it has a good and stormy feel to it but now  I want to blend the photo into the background to make it look like the whole background is watery.  To do this I use a combination of masking and erasing using textured brushes.  The result is

At this point, I have opened up everything Dahlia in my Adobe Bridge.

As you can see the layout is taking shape now.  I have added a recolored embellishment and a music score stamp and script stamp as well.

Now I want to make the whole page look like it is raining!

To do that, I have to find a stamp that says "rain" to me.  I am going to use a stamp from Aurora Borealis which I think will work.  Off to experiment a bit!

What I ended up doing was making a brush out of the stamp using edit>define brush preset and then making the brush extremely big.  At this point I dropped the opacity to something that looked like grey rain to me and then swiped this brush a couple of times on separate layers above the photo but below the embellishment.  I then added a soft drop shadow and emboss.

I hope you can see the rain like grey brush work above.

Now all I have to do is add a title and I thought I would use some of the water drops from Castaway and complete the layout.

Here is the final layout.  I hope you all enjoy my rainy day in Venice and I also hope that this meets the challenge criteria for NBUS this month.  I posted the layout when I completed it to give you all a small taste of making use of stamps in a slightly different way.

CS Blog Hop March 2016 - Paris Flea Market

Wow Wow Wow!  What an absolutely delightful kit this month.  I had intended to make just one blog entry this month because of my broken arm surgery.  But no.  Here is my second entry.

This month I thought I would show you how to make an overlay.  As always, open a new new blank file 12" x 12" on a transparent background.

Then go ahead and open up all the components of the kit.

Now I have opened up a couple of background papers which I am going to use to select colors which I am going to use with some of my own brushes.

At this point go into your brushes palette and take a look for something fuzzy and interesting in shape.

You will see that I have two blank layers open. The reason for this is that I like to put everything on its own layer.  That way you can move, delete, change each element with ease. Having selected a brush, I have made two layers each with a color selected from the kit using the eyedropper.  You can play around with the opacity of these layers.  In this case I made the opacities around 70%.

Open up the frame cluster embellies and you will find 3 totally gorgeous premade frame clusters.  Personally I find these so useful.

Select the one that you would like to use and add it to the next blank layer you have above the paint spatters.

I have added a script stamp beneath the frame cluster on another layer.  Also a spatter brush and ribbon on their own layers.  The ribbon has a drop shadow on it too.  Now I think the overlay is complete.

Save the file as a merged png and you can use it many more times.

You can of course erase the grey and pink paint splatters from within the frame prior to merging the visible layers.

Somewhere on my computer I have a photo that I would like to use beneath this overlay.  OK I found the photo and added a title and some journalling and now all I need is a background paper.

Background selected but you can see that the journalling and title have pretty much disappeared so all I have to do now is change the color of the text and voila!

I hope you have enjoyed my creative journey this month.

Club Scrap March 2016 - Paris Flea Market - Technique Challenge

You all probably know by now that I had a surgery on my left arm on 1st March to repair the surgery from April 2015.  Right now, I am able to type with my right hand only as a result of being tightly bandaged and unable to move my fingers.

So this month I thought I would try to keep my blog post pretty simple and do a selection of the quick drop layouts that we get each month in our kits.  At this point you can all roll your eyes and laugh!  I cannot keep ANYTHING simple let alone my blog post and with such a gorgeous kit this is no surprise.

As always - open up a new file, 12" x 12" at 300ppi transparent background.

At this point, I opened one of the background papers and selected the pink using the eyedropper tool.  Fill the background using the paint bucket tool and you have created a plain pink background.

This is where the fun starts.  I noticed in the forum that Lisa Dolezal is hosting a Master Board Swap based on this month's technique challenge so I thought I would play along.  Make a new layer and create a stamp by using the define brush preset under the edit menu and stamp within the new layer.

Continue to make brushes and stamp until you have a result that pleases you.  In this case, I have stamped in colors selected from the background papers by using the eyedropper tool.

Here is what I have so far.

I have continued to add more stamps and now have a finished piece.

Now to finalise, merge visitible layers together and you now have your new background.  It does not stop there for me.  I added  blank transparent layer beneath the background, cut out a hole and added one of the beautiful clusters on top of the background.

I have now filtered and recolored a photo and added it to the layout.

I think I am now done with the layout.  I do hope you all like what I did.

Club Scrap Blog Hop - February 2016 - Crewel and Unusual

Hello everyone

I hope you are all well into 2016 and things are settled down after the holidays.  Speaking for myself, I am now extraordinarily busy as a result of surgery on 1st February, again on 15th February and scheduled another operation for 23rd February.

Aside from the above, I thought the kit this month was really special.  You have probably noticed that I have added several pieces to the galleria and I do hope you all like them.

This month, I thought we could investigate a little more about editing photos.  We will be looking at the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop cc and Photoshop Elements.

First off, let's go find a photo.

I have opened up my Bridge and navigated to a folder called copyright free images.

You will see from the above that I have dozens and dozens to choose from!  Here is a photo that I thought would show you some uses for dodge and burn.

Always make a duplicate layer or two at this point so you have two photos to work with.  I have also renamed the two duplicate layers.  To do that double click the layer name with the cursor over it and when the existing text is highlighted you can go ahead and type your new name.

Let's look at dodge first.  The tool itself looks like a filled in magnifying glass and on my workspace it is located in the middle of the vertical tool panel on the left side of the screen.  The dodge tool will lighten selected areas on your photo.  Below is a fairly exagerrated version so you can see the tool in action.  I selected a fairly large round fuzzy brush to do this with just to show you what effect the dodge tool has.

To me this image looks over cooked so I am going to back off the brushed dodge and make it somewhat less pronounced.

I just went ahead and painted over the middle of the photo at 90% opacity to make the highlight very subtle.  I do hope you can see that in the screenshot below.

You have all probably guessed by now that the burn tool does the opposite of the dodge tool!!!  It is located in the submenu behind the dodge tool and looks like a hand with just the index finger and thumb touching.

Below I have done a burn on the same part of the image that I did the dodge on.  Again this is very exagerrated so you can see what the tool actually does.

What I am now going to do is make the outer edges and sides of this photo somewhat darker almost creating a vignette.

You can definitely see that the sides of this photo are very much darker but have not lost very much detail.

Both the dodge and burn tool lighten and darken while preserving the underlying detail.

At this point, I played around a bit with the opacity of the dodge layer and then merged the visible layers together.

This is the resulting image.

Here are both images side by side so you can see the effects of both the dodge (lighten) and the burn (darken) tools.

On my screen the dodge and burn are both very pronounced and I think that this photo has a somewhat stormy feel to it now that I have edited it.  Anyway, now to the layout.  Back to the Bridge and open up all the Crewel and Unusual kit.

I am going to have to recolor quite a lot of the components to match the photo but ... I think the result will be quite dramatic.

Here are the components of the kit.

As always open up a new file, I use 12" x 12" at 300ppi.

Bring in some background paper and recolor using the eyedropper tool.

Here you can see that I am already building the layout using some papers and an overlay.

Finally I added one of the wonderful pieces of word art that came with the kit.

I think this is now complete.  The photo is very atmospheric and the overlay and word art make it truly pop.

I do hope you have enjoyed my explanation of the dodge and burn tools in photoshop and the creative process for the layout.

Looking forward to seeing you again next month.