{creative soul}

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.

 

Tutorial: Digital Art Journaling...

What is an Art Journal? This morning, I found this definition on Wicktionary....

art journal (plural art journals)

1. A collection of words and images in a diary that chronicles the ideas, memories, and thoughts of an artist. Pages within an art journal include words, pictures and even embellishments.

Basically, it can be anything you want it to be... it is like a journal but is very expressive & theraputic because you are working in whatever medium you want. I just started taking Roben-Marie's wonderful Mixed Media Mayhem class and I love her style! She is so fun and free-flowing and experimental. She works in mixed-mediums like gesso, charcoal, pen, and mostly spray water washes by Adirondack. The results are gorgeous layers of color. If you have time, check it out!

For today's tutorial, we are going to be creating an art journal digitally using Christine (Fiddlette Designs) and I's new Journal Your Art Out kit! This is first in a series of kits dedicated to the art of Art Journals. It's so fun & truly something to do for yourself — to have fun experimenting and playing, digitally of course! Ready? Let's Go!

First, let's open up a background to play with... you can choose whatever you want, but I chose my background 2 from the kit.

Next, load up your brushes. We'll be loading up the charcoal drawings & jumbo stamped alpha set from Journal your Art out.

Find some flower stems and circles and begin to stamp out whatever design you want!

This is what I settled on....

I tend to make a new layer in Pshop each time I stamp so I can move stuff around and play until I like what I see. As you stamp, just hold down Shift+Command (Ctrl for PC) +N each time before you stamp to put each image on new layers.

Next, open up some of the painted bits circles from the kit...I dragged each of these circles individually to just behind the charcoal circles on my art journal.

Do the same with some of the painted bit hearts...I used the hearts as leaves on my flower stems...

 

Okay, at this stage, go ahead and save your art journal page before we proceed (just to be safe in case you have an unstable Mac computer like I have! LOL)

Next, we will be using some of the masks and mask outlines included in the kit. Go ahead and open up the .png sheets for both ...

 

Then open up Christine's painted background CAH_houseRECTANGLE1.png.

Next, select the angel wing from the mask sheet and copy and paste it over to the painted background.

Drag your angel wing mask (Layer 1) underneath the background layer (Layer 0) and create a clipping mask by holding down Alt/Option and clicking between the layers in the Layers palette. You'll know you are on the right track because you will see two circles with a left arrow. Then you'll see a down left arrow on the painted background layer and your image of a wing will be clipped. Note: You can also create a clipping mask by going to Layers>Create Clipping Mask (or hold down Alt/Option & Command G).

Feel free to move your painted background layer around to play with what parts of it will peek through on your wing. This is the experimental part and it's really fun! Feel free here to also paint or stamp on your wing in your own style...

Once you get the look you want, Merge Down the layer so you are left with a perfectly decorated wing!

Drag your wing over to your art journal page. I placed mine next to my flower stem, making it look like a giant leaf. I also copied and pasted over the coordinating charcoal line outline and placed it over top of the wing. Additionally, I repeated these steps to add a flower to my second circle & stem as well as a star.

Next, I added a title, using the jumbo stamped alpha, varying the letter size and added some journaling.

To finish up, I played with the levels to saturate my background a bit and burned up the edges...

The key with any kind of art journaling is to make it your own. Fill it with your own style, thoughts & journaling. It is a fun way to journal but also I've found that for me, it's very theraputic — whether I'm using my paints or my computer.

If you'd like to download this finished art journal page of mine, you can download it here (6 MB).

Enjoy!
Nan

 

 

PS Tutorial: Leaves on Fire

I love Fall! I know I say this every autumn, but September seems to always roll around in a heartbeat and there it is again! Glorious, gorgeous, sun-drenched, COOL fall. Is it a coincidence that September is also my birthday month? I'm not sure,  but I know I feel most alive when the fall temps hit and the leaves begin to turn. All the good things come with fall too... crisp, sweet apples, cider & donuts, back-to-school and did I mention the donuts? :)

Along with all that goodness come the colors of Fall and in Michigan we are really blessed with some of the most beautiful fall color around! This year, though, fall is late, darn-it! With the unseasonal warm temps, the leaves are having a hard time turning. And if they turn, the colors aren't rich enough for me — so I thought I'd "Photoshop Fall"! Wanna join me? (If you want to play along, you can download the original scanned leaf (leaf1.png) as well as two other leaves here. (10 MB)

I found this leaf in my front yard and even though the colors were pretty, I wanted to brighten it up a bit.

Besides being in love with this time of year, I also have fallen in love with a website called Lost and Taken. It is the creation of Caleb Kimbrough. Caleb is a freelance photographer and cook who creates some really gorgeous (and high quality) textures. The best part he not only gives these beautiful textures away for free but he allows you to use them in your commercial work. As long as you don't try to package and resell them and that you not host them on your site, he is okay with that. Pretty cool, eh? While you are there, why not donate to the site? It's good karma especially since he is kind enough to give them away.

I ended up downloading two textures from Lost and Taken, a greenish-gold background and a bright orange with some great folds in it.

Next, I opened up the leaf1.png file and dragged the first green-gold background on top of my leaf. Using Option (Alt) G I created a clipping mask. Then I used a small circular eraser and erased the part over the stem. In the Layers palette I used an Overlay blend mode at 100% opacity.

and this is what it looked like....

Nice, huh?

But I really wanted it to look like it was on fire - like in October when the whole world is red and gold and green and burnt orange, you know? {btw, if you live in Southern California or somewhere in the Tropics, I apologize! :) LOL! }

So I dragged over the orange texture on top of the green  and enlarged it. Again, I erased the parts over the stem) and used Opt-G to make a clipping mask.

Using an opacity of 65% and a linear burn made the leaf really pop!

 

Last, but not least, I used the burn tool and a round feathered brush and burned in to the leaf's veins to make them more pronounced.

 

The end result is a bright, beautiful red-ish leaf!

 

But I'm not done yet! I want some of the greenish-yellow of my original leaf to show in the red. To do this, I created a layer mask on my topmost layer (the orange texture layer) and, using a small grunge brush in black, I "erased" away some of the layer to let the other colors show through.. mostly around the edges of the leaf.

 

Again, if you want to download all three leaves, in .png format, plus the grunge brush, you can do so here.

Happy Fall!
Nancie

Digital Collage Video...

Today I created a digital collage piece called "Dream". I used several photos of textures and things I've taken over the past year as well as two of my ScrapArtStarts using Watermark Resist. I captured the process into a video that you can view on My YouTube Channel. If you would like to subscribe to my channel, I'm planning on making more how-to videos and fun things there.

And, if you'd like to download the finished collage piece, you can do so here (5 mb)

Enjoy!
Nan