We’re excited to share our new product line, Artisan Papers, which include painterly 12×12 papers for art journaling, wall art, card making, etc. Here are three collections and some wall art created using them for some fun inspiration. I especially like to add a quote from our Scrap.Words series and print for a quick gift!

See our team gallery for each layout’s details.

Happy creating! Michelle and team

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it! Tonya Regular here for a little design inspiration.

When starting a page, most often I do not have a plan in place or specific design techniques that I want to use.  I usually start by choosing a photo that I want to scrapbook – this one is not the best quality, taken out in the cold with snow falling, but I wanted to capture the memory of last winter’s first snow.

Often I’ll start by placing the photo on the background paper first and then arranging other page elements around it.  However, the muted colors and patterns in the Autumn Love Page Pak inspired me to start by using the blue paper as sort of a ribbon embellishment balanced on both sides, adding the punch label, then using a few fitting elements to anchor the photo between the two paper ribbons.  An autumn-themed pak might not be what first comes to mind when creating a winter page, but our page paks are versatile that way.

All of my pages are created as 8×8 rather than the traditional 12×12 or 24×24.  I started doing this some time ago due to memory restrictions on my laptop.  Although I’ve since upgraded, I still create 8×8 pages.  This means almost all of the materials I work with are resized as I’m creating. When resizing, care needs to be taken to not distort or degrade the quality.  Sometimes I resize to minimize the elements, when creating an accent cluster for instance.  Sometimes, I enlarge (or leave an element at its original size) to make a bolder statement on my page.  The punch label used on this page was enlarged for effect.

I wanted to add some contrasting color to the page and I love the DECEMBER title in the 2016 Everyday Calendar Pak.  Recoloring the snowflakes from the Christmas Wishes Page Pak and layering those added depth to the page. I finished it by adding the story inside the frame. As you can see, I like a lot of ‘white’ space in my layouts.

It’s pretty obvious what month this picture and story took place, but I’m realizing now – after the fact – that I did not include the year.  I know myself pretty well, so I know 5 years from now, I will not remember what year this was taken so I will go back and tuck in a “2015” text line.  This is what I love about digital scrapbooking – it preserves the memories and is so easy to edit and update.

That’s how I made this simple page. See other Punch Label pages here (minimized) and here (faded and blended)!

Happy creating, Tonya

Happy Thanksgiving, all! What a wonderful year it has been and we have much to be grateful for. Around here we’ve been busy licensing our art, writing, and creating and wanted to share some inspiration with you. We hope you have been nurturing your creative spirits, too!

This fall, I was more than thrilled to see art from my Autumn 2015 Somerset Digital Studio article on the front cover. The 5-page article is an easy how-to (with lots of ideas, too) for those who want to delve into using Double Exposure apps on your mobile device, as well as using Adobe Photoshop/Elements. The magazine is a piece of art with so much to learn, too, and am honored to have written for Stampington for over 10 years now. Grab it on newsstands, too. It makes a fabulous gift for a digital enthusiast.

On the site, we are having our 13th Annual Thanksgiving Sale (new products 50% off, too). Wow! Most of Philip’s life and now he’s a college freshman. Do capture memories of your family and friends, as time passes so very quickly and those moments will be etched in our hearts even better when we have them etched in photos, journaling, and art.

Check out our team gallery for layout ideas and technique tips and tricks. Most of the team has been with us for eight years already, and some for all 12:) Two recents from Tonya and Rikki are below.

Do you instagram? When time allows, I love to participate in challenges, especially those from #jj. This summer I posted a few and it’s really exciting when you get a shout out from them, like with my daffodil shot below. Mextures is my favorite iPhone app and #jj_mextures is a great place to be inspired by other creatives.

And what is inspiration nowadays without some Pinterest fun????? Here is some favorite color love.

Happy creating doing what you love! Michelle and Team

Layout credits: Everyday paper pak no. 17; Chevron Blends paper pak; Click.masks no. 26; Everyday paper pak 18; Word Travels InstaArt; Everyday paper pak no. 13; Nature’s Sketchbook Love Grows Element pak; Encouragement Art Journal page pak; Winged beauty element pak; Quiet of my heart page pak; Everyday Scrap.Words. Alles von Cottage Arts; Fonts: Appareo-Light, cattleyascript

Post by Rikki Donovan. Hi, Rikki here, to show you a great, non-destructive way to make digital tape look more realistic. I have started this layout and added a piece of tape from the Quiet of my Heart Page Pak beneath the torn paper on the right.

First give the tape a slight drop shadow. These are my settings:

Let’s show which paper is on top of the other, so you see which direction the tape is stuck on the paper. It goes from top right to bottom left.

To emphasize/show the edge of the paper underneath the tape you will use the dodge and burn tool on the Toolbar.

But before using dodge and burn you want to make sure your method is non-destructive. You create a layer above the tape, activate the new layer, ctrl+click on the tape layer so you see the marching ants around your tape and fill the empty layer above with 50% gray. That gray layer you set to Overlay blend mode. Now you cannot see the gray layer any longer.

The layers panel now looks like this

And the layout just like before

Now you ctrl+click on the paper that is on top to select it; you will see marching ants around it.

You activate the gray layer above the tape and choose the dodge tool. Here are my settings

You rather want to use low settings and repeat what you are doing instead of doing too much at once.

Now you dodge the tape along the ants within the selection, so that the side of the tape becomes slightly lighter.

Can you see the light edge to the right of the ants?

Now you invert the selection, so that the outside of the paper is selected (Shift+Ctrl+I) and choose the burn tool. My settings are like this

Here it is even more important to keep the settings low, otherwise you will end up with tape that looks just too dark to be real.

Now you burn the tape along the ants, this time on the other side, so the tape becomes a little darker.

Like so:

If you changed the blend mode of the gray layer to Normal it would look like this:

Now I treated my second piece of tape the same way and it looks like this:

And here the two tapes together.

Now with all the layers visible again, this is my page so far. Doesn’t this look much more realistic?

Remember, if you find your tape affect too much, just lower the opacity of the gray layer a little to suit your taste.

Here is a comparison of before and after

And this is my finished layout with a few more items and a title. Enjoy this simple yet useful technique!

Happy creating! Rikki and team

Post by Tonya Regular. Earlier this year, my daughter and I met up with nine other close friends and vacationed in California for eight days.  It was the first time we had taken such a vacation and was a big deal for us, especially as we from Canada and it was the dead of winter! While planning the trip, I was really looking forward to scrapbooking all the pictures once the trip was over. Knowing how important it would be to preserve the memories this way, I tried to pay close attention to the moments I wanted to capture while we were there.

See details and supplies for Tonya’s vacation layouts in our gallery here.

We visited many of the tourist-type places.  California Adventure Land, Disneyland, San Diego Zoo, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Most of those places involved a lot of color and movement and I knew my camera wasn’t always capturing it the way I hoped (I have an older model and not a cool cell phone camera like our teenage companions). Also, my daughter was so excited and rarely wanted to stand still in that perfect pose for a shot. Usually, my pictures almost completely focus on her so this experience was good for me to expand my photo subjects – I captured places, things, buildings and I even got in lots of pictures myself!

Thankfully, one of my favorite scrapbooking styles is to use a big picture and play around with blend modes, photo effects and opacity. When using this style, the quality of the photo is not so important. Experimenting with a neutral (or even slightly patterned) background paper often helps bring out the colors in my pictures.

I have two scrapbooking goals for these vacation pictures.  One is to create some pretty, traditional pages using some of the Scrap Templates, Scrap Frames and various Page Paks with corresponding colors and elements to really play up the pictures. I decided not to stick with one page pak as there are so many with great colors and elements that I can pair up with my pictures. I’ll have these pages printed in a photo book with a cover that includes a group picture of our travel party.

My other goal is to print a second book that showcases even more pictures (I did take more than 2000) in a collage-type format. There are a number Scrap Templates that can accommodate multiple photos and these are so easy and simple to create. Scrap Templates 48 Page Layouts was used to create the “Disney Parade” page and I plan to fill a second book with pages of this style.

Looking through all the pictures and choosing the perfect ones to use on each page is so much fun and I’m enjoying the memory-preserving process almost as much as the actual memory-making trip!

Happy scrapping! Tonya Regular

DianaPhoto app, Mextures app, Adobe PSE, simply love 3 scrap.words

So thrilled to share my latest Digital Workshop column in the Autumn 2014 issue of Somerset Memories, on newsstands and available for order. In this step-by-step article, I’ll lead you on a journey of creating stunning silhouette double exposures using Adobe Photoshop Elements or your cell phone apps.

This may be my favorite technique yet! And for this article, I’m offering the digital images to follow along to create the blended background shown below (word art available in our shop here).

DianaPhoto app, Mextures app, Adobe PSE, inspirational poster scrap.words

DOWNLOAD Free silhouette images here

Get this issue on Stampington’s site for a limited time here. For the past 10 years I have been a columnist with this amazing publishing company and consider it a highlight in my digital art journey.

And for an in-depth on-line class on blended silhouette artistry, see my forever access Soulful Silhouettes Class at Digital Scrapper.

See our Sweet Silhouettes pinboard for even more ideas!

Happy creating!

Michelle and team

michelle shefveland

Who doesn’t love discovering new skills using your digital art stash to make digital scrapbooking even more economical, uniquely you, and such fun?! Today we’ll share four simple customization techniques: selective re-coloring of embellishments/papers, rearranging word art, custom drop shadows, and blending of Click.Masks to complement your photos and design.

Many digital scrapbookers like to use a coordinating kit of papers and elements and keep colors as they are and add photos that complement those colors. That’s awesome! Others like to mix and match papers, elements, and word art from various kits and then part of their creative process fun is making them work together cohesively with a chosen photo or set of images (and many like to do some of both!). Here’s one example of that mix-n-match process for the layout above…

Mix-n-Match

First off, I had chosen an iPhone photo of poppies and irises as the focal subject of my art. To this I added a World Travels 2 collage paper, torn paper Click.Mask, Love Grows Scrap.Word quote with butterfly, and butterfly trail. Kind of a hodge podge of unmatched stuff. But let’s see how fun it is to bring it all together.

Creative Recoloring 

The easiest and most common edit is probably re-coloring of papers. For this multi-patterned map collage paper I simply changed the overall hue -16 in Photoshop Elements (Ctrl-U for PC or Cmd-U for Mac shortcut) from tan to a warm salmon.

Next I changed the hue of the blue word art to plum (+67).

A bit more involved, but really useful, technique is selective recoloring. See the butterfly element? It was originally teal and gold and I wanted it plum and salmon. Hmmm…how do you do this? In two steps. With the first step, you do as above and make an overall color change to one of those colors. In this case, we made the center of the butterfly salmon. This made the outer part of the wings green.

OK. Now, the really fun part. Select Enhance>Adjust Color>Replace Color. Using the eye dropper selection tool in the Replace Color dialog (default selection tool) and your mouse, click on the color in the element you want to change. I clicked on the green in the wings. You have some leeway here on the amount of matching of that color with the Fuzziness slider. In the lower part of the dialog box play with the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders to get your desired end color. For me, I set the Hue to +155 for a soft plum and now I have a beautiful complementary butterfly.

Rearranging Word Art

With word art you might love one of our quotes’ font work, but once you get your layout designed it might not lay out as you really want. With just a few steps in your image editor, you can quickly and easily rearrange most word art.  As I worked on this design in particular, the Click.Mask fit beautifully in the lower left square block. The word art in its original square footprint didn’t jive with this. I came up with the idea to cut it in half and rotate the bottom half so it wrapped around the photo at the top right. So easy to do.

Simply select the word art layer in the Layers Panel, select the Rectangular Marquee Tool and draw around the part you want to cut away with the mouse or your tablet’s pen tool.

Select Edit>Cut and then Edit>Paste and your selected word art will be moved to its own layer to move. I then rotated it 90 degrees right (Image>Rotate>Layer 90 Right) and with the Move Tool positioned it where I wanted it. Done! At this point you could also change the color or size of this portion of the word art for even more variation.

Custom Drop Shadows

Finally, as shown in detail in my custom shadow tutorial (using Photoshop Elements), I also opted to add a lifted drop shadow to the butterfly for more realism.

So, there you have it! A completely custom piece all your own. And lots of ideas to keep you scrapping for eons (ok…maybe that’s an exaggeration)! Here’s the final again:

Blending/Recoloring of Click.Masks

Another editing technique we have featured on the blog before is changing the color of our Click.Masks in order to enhance blending into the paper layer beneath. Featured in the layout below, I changed the color of the black painted Click.Mask to white, setting the blend mode to overlay and then clipping the photo to that click.mask. See a detailed how-to on our blog here. I also re-colored the word art to blue to complement my dress.

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

More Inspiration

Below, our team had fun recoloring and rearranging elements and papers for these pretty pieces. See layout details, including creative edits, in our gallery here.

Happy creating! Michelle and team

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

beth ervin

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

Tonya regular

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

beth ervin

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

beth ervin

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

rikki donovan

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

beth ervin

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, and some of us recently losing our beloved Moms…our team created some special tributes to them.

May the memories and love of those no longer with you bring much peace, knowing they live within us always.

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

Layout details can be found in our Mom gallery here.

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

karen wilhelm

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

rikki donovan

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

michelle shefveland

Peace,

Michelle and Team

Time for another fun digital art how-to! You see them on most magazine covers…those cool titles that look like they are setting behind the cover photo. Let’s see how easy it is to do. I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop Elements here, but any version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or Corel PaintShop Pro Photo will work too (any image editor with layers and blending modes).

1. Open Photoshop Elements
2. Open your desired photo, which should have a sharp subject easy to separate from background. A silhouette image is perfect!  [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
3. Crop the image to 12×12 or size of finished layout
4. Open the papers you would like to use for blending/adding texture. In this sample I used a jumbo chevron from Be Bold and and 2 Photo Art Blends from set 6.
5. Drag and drop the papers onto the photo.
6. Experiment with blending modes and opacity of each layer until you get desired effect. [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
7. Here is how the Layers Panel looked at this point showing the Blend Modes and Opacities. [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
8. Add poster-sized word art, which fills your page. I used Soul3 from our Inspirational Poster Scrap.Words set.  [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
9. Experiment with blend modes. I set mine to Screen at 70%. [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
10. Now for the magic. There are different methods to get the same result and we’ll use what I believe to be the easiest. Using the Magic Wand Tool click on your subject on the photo layer and keep clicking until the subject is totally selected. You can use another favorite selection tool for this step such as the Magic Selection Brush. Whatever works best for you. I smoothed my selection by about 5 pixels to get a more smooth selection (Select>Modify>Smooth>5>OK).  [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
11. Now simply copy this selection onto its own layer (Ctrl+J; Cmd+J for a Mac). [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]
12. Move this selection layer above your word art layer, and voila…magic!  [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net]

So that’s all there is to it. Really cool, right?! Very fun to use on sports pages, as well as full page blended photos.

Happy creating! Michelle and team

Hello all! We’ve been busy around here the past many months with some exciting partnerships and wanted to share the news with you, too.

Many of our long-time followers will remember our partnership with Jasc/Corel that started 11 years ago. I was blessed to write a book for them in 2003, Scrapbooking the Digital Way, as well as license all our CDs for re-sale in their format. This wonderful relationship has been renewed, and we are excited to have a large collection of our art bundled with Corel PaintShop Pro Photo for special promotions. Stay tuned in their newsletter for future announcements.

Some may also know that I worked with Creative Memories in 2006-2007 to help develop their digital product/software division, as Creative Memories’ headquarters is here in St. Cloud. With their recent re-structure I have been able to again work with the co-creators of StoryBook Creator Software, Panstoria, and am selling our art in their shop in their proprietary format. More of our kits will be added weekly.

If Photoshop Elements is a bit overwhelming, give Artisan (their version of StoryBook Creator) a try! I am thrilled to again be a part of the software side of digital scrapbooking (using my technical degree) and look forward to seeing all Artisan will be in the upcoming versions.

  [See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net] melinda vermeer

And, the team has had creative fun mixing patterned papers and geometric shapes. See details and more layouts in our patterns and shapes gallery.

See our current sale in the shop on all purchases, for a limited time.

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net] tonya regular

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net] tonya regular

[See image gallery at www.cottagearts.net] beth ervin

As always, keep learning and happy creating!

Michelle and team