Layering Stamps to Create a Background

I hope you all had a great weekend! Last week, I noticed I have a lot of stamps in my digiscrap stash that I’ve never used. I finally decided to pull some out and use them for a background. In this case, I grabbed the stamped mess {hexagon} stamps.

I already had a photo in mind, but I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to scrap it. So, I just pulled up a blank page and decided to have fun with the stamp. I started by putting one of the hexagon stamps on a gray background.

Next, I wanted to fill in the hexagons with one of the dominant colors from my photo. I found a paper from here. there that I really liked and used that to clip to the hexagon layer. (Clipping a paper to a .png is one of my quick tricks. I’ll be doing that for the next several layers.)

I decided to layer another hexagon stamp on top and resize it a bit. Then I moved it over the first hexagon layer.

I selected another color I wanted to highlight in the photo and clipped another paper – from today - to the second hexagon layer.

I decided one more hexagon layer would be perfect for the background.

And this time, I chose a pink paper – from watercolor canvas – to clip to the third hexagon layer.

With all the hexagons, the photo just didn’t seem right as a rectangle. So I decided to frame the photo with another stamp – this oval frame stamp is from stamped mess {today}. I resized the stamp so that it framed the photo just how I wanted.

Since I didn’t want the excess portion of the photo (i.e. the corners), I decided to create an oval mask. With the ellipse tool, I created an oval to fit inside the frame.

With the oval the correct size, I moved the photo layer above the oval and clipped it.

Perfect! The last part to this layout was to go ahead and add a title, journaling, and some elements. Here are the final results:

CREDITS
Papers: today, watercolor canvas, here.there. (Studio 68)
Elements: border madness {cozy fall}, stamped mess {hexagons}, stamped mess {today}, amici, the list and paint your story challenge 1 freebie (Studio 68)
Fonts: Wish I Were Taller (title); Traveling Typewriter (journaling, date)

You might have noticed I had a different border in the screenshots. I wasn’t happy with the way it looked, so I changed it. I also swapped out the background to white since the colors popped a bit more. And, I also reduced the opacity of the frame so it was softer.

I hope this inspires you to try using stamps a bit more on your layouts!

Dream and a how-i-did-it

“Dream“

Design It Forward – Happy Face
a ScrapArtist Exclusive

Karen asked me if I could do a tutorial on how to achieve this effect, so here is the how-i-did-it:

the papers

I started out with these papers, there is something about them, of all the papers in the kit, these with the painty artsy look, I HAD to use them.

the photo and the paintstrokes

I used this photo and as you can see, it is all blurry, but since I didn’t want to chuck it, I love the look on his face and had waited for the opportunity to use it blended on a layout. And now I got my chance. The paintstrokes are perfect for this, you simply mask the photo with it (in the following the words brush, mask and paintstrokes may be used for the same element, please don’t hate me for it LOL).

the layers of my document

Let’s get started with a new document (CTRL-N) in the size you want to scrap, I picked the whitish paper as my background, dragged the mask on top of it and and then my photo (see the left side of the screenshot). To clip the photo to the mask, hover between those two layers, hold the ALT-key and click with your left mouse button when the little hand changes to two overlapping circles. Now the photo has taken on the form of your mask. If you don’t like the appearance of it, you can move the photo or mask, turn by using the transform tool Edit>Transform>Rotate or clicking CTRL-T until you like it. For resizing, simply drag the corners. If you hold the SHIFT-key while doing that, the proportions stay intact.

blend mode: color dodge

Now I’m gonna change the blending mode of the photo, click the layer you want to blend and go to the box where you have different blending options. I used color dodge, this mode kept the highlights the highlights and the darker colors of my photo took on the colors of the paintstrokes. I also liked the effect of the linear dodge or the screen mode, but the color dodge gave me a bit more contrast. Just play with these blending modes, by dragging the slider of the opacity, you can soften the effect. Instead I strengthened it by duplicating the photo layer in color dodge mode and clipped that to the mask too.

green paper clipped

To throw in a splash of green, yeah you know, he is still a boy LOL, I used the green painted paper, duplicated the brush and clipped the paper to it. I turned the brush and placed it a bit to the left. By turning off the other layers (clicking the eyes to the left of the layers) you can now see where and how it is positioned.

other elements used

Turning on all other layers again, I dragged the other elements I wanted to use and  placed them wherever I thought they looked good. Made my title with the alpha and placed some of the flowers behind some letters, got some instant word art. No shadows needed, the alpha came slightly preshadowed. Ha, this tutorial took me longer than making the layout. (for the screenshots I used Danielle Donaldson’s Handy Dandy Day Brushes and Tangie Baxter’s The Director’s Font)

Et voilà, here is the finished page again:

ETA: it is always nice to wake up and find out your page has been placed into the GSO at DST! thanks to Fitria!