Article written using Photoshop Elements 8 with Windows 7
The 1st and 15th of each month feel a little bit like Christmas to me. When club products come out, I am so excited to see what the creative designers at Scrap Girls come up with. July’s ScrapSimple Club by Katherine Weaver was no exception.
When I first opened the club, it reminded me of baking with my British nana. She always had something sweet and delicious that she needed “help” from my brother and me to make. When I had children of my own, I knew I wanted to recreate these same memories with them. My kids and I also spend many a rainy afternoon making pastries and decorating treats at our dining room table. As I delved into Katherine’s ScrapSimple Club, I instantly knew I wanted to use it to scrap these memories.
For this tutorial, I chose to focus on the ScrapSimple Alpha Templates: What’s Baking. When I saw them, I thought of cut-out sugar cookies, but with different colors, they could just as easily be breads or other pastries. Because the pictures I chose to scrap were full of colorful sprinkles and frosting, I also decided to try using Shalae Tippetts’ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: Sweet Shoppe 4901 Biggie on the alphas to create “cookie” word art.
Shalae’s tool can easily style shapes and alphas to look like cream-colored, frosted cookies by simply applying that style to the alpha, but I wanted a few letters to stand out with colored icing. So I duplicated the alpha layer of a few letters by right-clicking the alpha layer, then selecting “Duplicate Layer.”
The bottom layer was the cookie and the second layer was the icing and decoration on top, like the finished product below.
Once the two layers were created, I temporarily hid the copy layer by clicking the eye icon to the left of the layer in order to see the first layer for re-coloring.
Next, I colored the bottom layer to look like a cookie. To do this, set the Color Picker Tool to a pale yellow or tan color. Then in the toolbar on the top, click Layer > New Fill Layer > Solid Color, and check the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option. Then overlay the fill layer to make it look like a cookie.
Next, re-click the eye icon next to the copy layer to unhide it. Shrink it a bit to prepare it to be icing.
Then apply a colored icing style to the layer copy from ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: Sweet Shoppe 4901 Biggie.
If you’d like a few sprinkles, duplicate the colored “icing” layer to create a third layer and apply a “sprinkles” style.
Once all the layers are colored and styled, click Shift+Ctrl+E to merge the layers – and now you have a super-cute cookie letter!
Continue this process for a few other letters. Then mix and match the “cookie” alphas to create the title. I admit that I had so much fun with all of the options that I got a little carried away, but that’s the beauty of the ScrapSimple Club. You can add as much or as little detail as you want.
Give it a try! Use ScrapSimple Styles with ScrapSimple Alpha Templates: What’s Baking to create word art and titles for your own fun foodie layouts.
Be sure to let us know what interesting word art and papers you create using this month’s ScrapSimple Club by sharing your layouts in the Scrap Girls Gallery.
Commercial license versions of ScrapSimple Alpha Templates: What’s Baking,ScrapSimple Paper Templates: Kitchen Kitsch, ScrapSimple Paper Templates: Kitchen Textures, ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: Sweet Shoppe 4901 Biggie, Sweet Shoppe Collection and ScrapSimple Digital Layout Album Templates: 12×12 Album Series 10 are also available.