Friday 18 February 2011

Did you see Cilenia’s awesome Technique Thursday?

Go over to the Digital Designer Shop Blog and Cilenia shows you how to create beautiful textured papers using my Textured Overlays pack.  Actually her tutorial is so good that I am putting it in my blog too!  In case you didn’t know there are loads of amazing tutorials on the blog!  Go check them out!

Technique Thursday - Color and Texture - Digital Designer Shop

When I saw Veevs's, (Honey Scraps), new CU Textures I just knew I had to use them!  And I thought what better way to use them then to show you a little of my process that goes into it and one way how to use these wonderful Textures.  Veevs has done all the hard work for us by creating these little sweeties.

So the first thing I do is look for color inspirations.  I can find them everywhere.  A flower, a piece of clothing I love, an advertisement, or an article about Benjamin Moore paint colors for your home!  Which is where I found my inspiration for these in last month Better Home's and Garden Magazine.  

I usually like the darker muted Mediterranean colors, but with my soul craving spring, these more modern colors inspired me just perfect.  And the textures shown in the ad also appeal to me too especially the top multi colored one under the Lenten Rose flower.  It looked just like one of Veevs's textures she just released today in her Honey Scraps CU Textures 01.

So I started with a scan of the page from the magazine.  Opened it in my Photoshop.  Then I used my eyedropper using a 5x5 picker area and picked each color from the page adding each to my color palette.

I then saved my colors to a new color swatch palette and called it ModMediterranean.

I opened a new file 12x12 300ppi and created a new layer for each color.

I then used my paint bucket tool and applied each color to each layer.

I then opened the Honey Scraps CU Textures 01 kit file HS_CU Textures 01 01.jpg and dragged it to the top of my layers.

See a screen shot of my layers to the right here.

I changed the layer blend mode to Soft Light and took the opacity down to 50% where I thought it looked just right for a nice texture over my colors.

That was it!  I then saved my file as a jpg turning off my layers as I went down on each color saving each one as I went.  Easy peasy!  I now have a nice linen type texture just perfect for this color palette! 

Like it?  You can get this sweet little paper pack today for free here called Modern Mediterranean Color Inspiration!  

image

Hope you enjoyed and you learned how easy our CU textures really make it creating your own papers from your own color inspirations!

Cilenia – those papers are beautiful and wonderful tutorial!  I will be making more yummy texture packs!



Thursday 17 February 2011

Textures – do you like Textures?

Things have been kind of hectic so didn’t get a chance to create anything for a few weeks, but I now have 2 kits of fabulous textures in the shop at Digital Designer Shop!

HS-CU-Textures-01-Preview

HS_CU-Textures-02-Preview

Each kit contains 4 12x12 jpg files that are wonderfully realistic textures. You can overlay on patterned paper or solid colors and change your blending mode, or use with Photoshop's Texturing tool, apply as a Fx Layer texture style.  Try mixing them up too and using your masks to erase parts for a blended look.

If you want to learn more about using textures See Cilenia’s wonderful Designing with Textures Tutorial here in the shop for more in-depth tutorials.