Article written using Adobe Photoshop CS6 with Windows 7
You’ve chosen the photos carefully and written down all the digital supplies you need to create your digital scrapbook page. After spending an hour blending papers, cropping, making masks, and adding embellishments, what do you title the page? Some titles come to mind easily, especially if you have a certain theme already in mind. A quote, a phrase, even a simple word can sum up the feeling of the layout.
You want your title to set the mood of the emotion you are trying to capture on the page. Is your layout playful, contemplative, funny, or serious? Try to portray that feeling in your title design. While there is an awesome assortment of Word Art files to choose from in the Scrap Girls Boutique, if you aren’t finding what you had in mind, it’s time to create a custom title! It’s easy – just gather some fonts and alphas and add your creativity! Let me show you how!
While working on this page, I chose the Big Boys Toys Collection and decided that simply adding big, bold text to my layout wasn’t going to portray what I really wanted. Digging around in my supplies and browsing in the Scrap Girls Boutique, I found what I was looking for. I love the way the words “Hangin’ Out” from the Stylize Word Art Stickers Mini has that freestyle, grunge feel to it.
For Mater’s name, I wanted it to have a cutout look, so I chose the ScrapSimple Alpha Template: Beautiful Life Collage. The alphabet is individual, layered PSD files and comes with a great PDF tutorial file to tell you how to change the look of them. Because it has that information, I’ll tell you the settings I changed to make my letters look the way they do.
First, I turned off the texture layer and added a pattern overlay to the background. The pattern I chose is slate. I changed the color of the font to a blue, selected from the photo, and added a white outer glow. I also changed the color of the inner glow around the square to a rust brown, also chosen out of the photo. Here is a before-and-after look at the letters:
To make the title more interesting, I changed the sizes and angles of the individual letters. It still seemed a bit bland to me, so I looked through the embellishments of the Big Boys Toys Collection and found string. That would be the perfect piece to “tie” it all together.
I arranged the letters to make them look as if they were strung on. After adding a layer mask and hiding parts of the string, I added a slight drop shadow.
It still didn’t look real, so I added some holes to the letter cards. To do this, create a layer below the string layer by making sure you have the string layer selected, then hold Alt (Windows) or Command (Mac) and click on the new layer icon in the bottom of the Layers Panel. Then, using a round brush with the hardness at 100%, make sure your foreground color is black, and click where the hole for the string would be on each letter card. You may need to clean up the string a little to make it appear as if it’s going into the hole, but that’s why you made a mask on the string layer. It’s easy to brush back in the parts you need to be seen.
There you have it, a custom title! Take some time today to explore the Fonts and Alphas available in the Boutique. I would love to see your examples of custom titles in the Scrap Girls Gallery!
Digital scrapbooking products used:
Commercial license versions of ScrapSimple Alpha Templates: Beautiful Life Collage are also available.
Tutorial written by Kari Kumura