Creating Digital Scrapbook Papers + Freebie

Wow, long time, no blogging. Sometimes life just gets in the way and blogging has to wait until things calm down a bit. Spring semester classes have started up and I’m keeping very busy with two classes this semester; one on teaching community college students and the other called instructional patterns. The good news is that they mark the end of my classes in education and the beginning of my area of specialization. Yippee, I’m moving closer to completion!

I’ve been test driving some new Commercial Use (CU) products by Coppercurls Designs. What fun I’ve been having making digital papers. The two products that I used were Wallpaper Pattern Set 1 and Paper Blenders, both items are available at Coppercurls Designs’ shops at Escape and Scrap and Digital Design Den. I went the simple route but are some very luscious looking examples using paper blenders in Roxi’s store. So in the middle of writing this up, I just had to try them out…. I took two papers that I made for the Fall Guy kit and in a matter of minutes made the awesome page below.

Back to my original plan, I combined paper 2 from Wallpaper Pattern Set 1 and paper 2 from the Paper Blenders. My first thought when seeing the wallpaper paper pattern papers that they would be really great used to emboss the papers. I haven’t made embossed papers before so my first thought was to use a tutorial and learn a new technique. I found a tutorial on making embossed text and ended up with a really nice looking embossed paper. The bad news was that I had not really followed the instructions very well and when I tried to write up the instructions for you, I was unable to duplicate the results. Lesson number 1 – take good notes so you can reproduce “your masterpiece”. So when trying to remember how I did the first paper, I came up with paper number 2, where I filled the background with color, added two layers of wallpaper pattern, and topped it off with the blender paper blended as Overlay. On the first layer of the wallpaper pattern, I contracted the pixels by one and filled with purple color. The bottom layer, I filled with pink a little darker than the background and used Gaussian blur with the radius set to 2.2. Here’s how it turned out. I like how I was able to achieve a two-color effect with the wallpaper pattern and hope to employ this in different ways in future papers. I like the soft transition created by using the Blend mode in overlay.

I still hadn’t forgotten about the embossed paper which I think looks so elegant so I tried another google search and came up with one for Photoshop Elements called Embossed Textured Paper at Alibony. I skipped the part about the texture since I was mainly looking for information on how to make the wallpaper pattern look embossed. Here’s the embossed paper. I used a color fill on the base page. I added the blender paper which I recolored to #0c3932 as the second layer with the blend mode set to multiply. Next used Karen’s instructions to create the embossed paper look. I changed the color of the wallpaper pattern from black to a soft tan color (#f2dbc6). I really liked the shabby look that the multiply blend mode created here.

Then as I was going over the instructions for the embossed textured paper, the textured part caught my eyes and so I after I filled the blank page with color I created an adjustment layer and selected pattern. For my pattern, I selected Arty-Pharty Denim, texture 4 – a CU product created by Lisa (http://arty-pharty.blogspot.com/). I looked briefly on her blog today but I didn’t see it there anymore but there are probably similar products available or you could just scan in a piece of denim. Update, folks, I sent an email to Lisa and she posted her CU Denim textures back on her blog so hop on over to Arty-Pharty blog and pick yourself out some goodies. I like using seamless patterns because they are relatively small and designed so you can’t see how the pattern repeats. I’ve been disappointed with a lot of commercial use glitter when you fill in a large area, you can definitely see where the pattern repeats. I find that unacceptable so I usually do something to “fix” it. I also thought that the wallpaper pattern should also have the same texture as the background so I recolored the wallpaper to the same color as the background offset the design by a couple of pixels and copied the adjustment layer to use with the wallpaper pattern, I then merged the adjustment layer with the wallpaper and reversed the offset. I inserted the blender paper above the embossed layer (on the paper above the blender is between the background and the embossing) and used it a clipping masked for a layer filled with the soft tan color (#f2dbc6). I then set the blending mode for the blender to Pin Light. I love the way this paper turned out: soft, elegant, a little shabby.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless! I have only used one paper from each set and am so ready to play around some more. I have bundled up the four papers that I’ve shown you here click on the preview or the link below it. Even if you don’t make commercial use products, it can be fun to make your own custom made papers for your projects.

Download Lainey’s PaperPack Coppercurls Designs Sampler.

Thanks for dropping by. If you’d like more details, with photos, on how I made the papers, please leave a comment. Why don't you stop by Coppercurls Blog and tell her thanks for the great paper tools.