Fab Friday: Digital Art Journal Tutorial

Hello and Happy Friday to you! Today, I am going to show you a fun tutorial to use for your digital art journaling! We'll be using an inspiration piece from Art.com in combination with my ColorWash Brushes to "paint" on our art journal canvases!

First, in Photoshop, open up an existing painted art journal background that has yellow-orange hues to it.

Then, open up your inspiration pieces. The pieces I chose were more painterly but they can be anything that speaks to you. Remember when using existing artwork to inspire your personal art journals, to respect the original artist by not copying it verbatim - change it up and make it your own!

Next, load up my Color Wash brushes and, using your color picker, pick up the purple from the inspiration piece. Choose a rough vertical brushstroke. Here I decided on the fourth one in. Then in my brush presets, under Shape Dynamics,  I selected flip x & y jitter so it would give me some variance while I brushed.

I also chose the Color Burn mode to burn in a rich purple color as I painted...On a New Layer, go ahead and get painting!! :) Do this until you have a look you like. I chose to do this in the middle of the page. Change the opacity to 37% percent:

Find a horizontally-oriented brush that you like. I chose this one, from the color wash set:

And using my inspiration piece as a reference, on a new layer, I painted the top, creamy yellow portion. I left the orange- yellow background showing through on the edges, just as it does in the Art.com print.

Next, making another new layer for each part of this next painting section, paint in the gray areas. Choose varying levels of the gray and combine it with varying opacity levels on each layer. This is what I ended up with:

Then, to get the brushed look on the bottom to look my art piece,  I added yet another layer of gray, then added a layer mask and painted in the layer mask with the same vertical brush, in black to erase away parts of the layer....

Whew! Okay, are you still with me? LOL! See that brown sketchy line in our art piece? Choose a horizontal grungy brush or doodly border brush. I ended up choosing both - hey it's okay to do because this is our art journal and we can do anything we want, right?! :) Choose a rich brown color for your paint brush and on a new layer, paint in that horizontal border line, anywhere you wish!

I thought the space below the horizontal line was a good place to add my title. For my page, I wanted to put down in words all the wishes I have for my daughter. So my title was "My Wish for You". I added a doodley flower to the title:

For my last step, I thought the purple paint block in my art inspiration piece would be a perfect place to put my journaling for this page. So, from my color picker, I selected the rich purple from the art piece and, on a new layer, I painted in vertical block, using this brush from my color wash set:

I duplicated the layer and flipped it vertically, choosing "Color Burn" from Layer Styles and an opacity of 78%:

My last step was to add my journaling - my wishes for my daughter: sunny days & starry nights, moments that take your breath away, love that lasts a lifetime,  good friends to stick by your side, children to snuggle with and show the way, wonderful pets,  a small house and a large garden, the courage to be yourself and to live every day of your life in gratitude & joy.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! The doodle flower and border are from my upcoming Doodle Book brushset, which will be available next week in my shoppe!

Have a wonderful weekend and I can't wait to see your pages!

xo
N.

 

Comments

[latz (Lisa Breuer)]

This is beautiful Nancie! Thanks for sharing your process.

[VickiR]

Great tutorial! Thanks Nancie!!!

[Christine Honsinger]

terrific tut, Nan! love the page, too!

[Yvonne Michelle]

What a beautiful blog you have! I had to add it to my bookmark bar so I'd come back and relax a while here.

[pammie~k]

What a great tutorial - cant wait to try it out! thank you

[claire]

Wonderful! So beautiful! I like it very much. Thank you for sharing it.