{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.

 

Digital Art Journaling...

I'm really excited to tell you about two digital art journaling projects that I'm currently involved in. First, my new collaboration with my friend Christine Honsinger (aka Fiddlette Designs) is out. Journal Your Art Out 3 is filled with all the great art journaling basics...painted backgrounds and elements, acrylic paint alpha, and messy stitches. It's a great kit to start your digital art journaling!

Next, I have created an exclusive kit for Jessica Sprague's upcoming Digital Art Journaling class which starts next Monday. This is going to be a fantastic class! Besides the kit (which is packed with over 200+ digital art journal supplies like backgrounds, stitching, grungy brushes, photo frames & masks, ephemera and more!) you will get journal prompts from Jessica, along with great video tutorials. Come and join us!

For those of you who aren't sure what art journaling is, it is similar to a scrapbook layout, but instead of photos and stories of your family & events, this is all about YOU! It's a place to explore and practice your art, but also it is very healing because you also explore your feelings and dreams and goals. Think of it as Art Therapy! I have been enjoying painting and creating mixed media in my own art journals in my basement studio. But then I love scanning things in and creating art journal pages digitally too! You can really fill up a page with whatever you want and you come away feeling lighter. Plus, if you create a page digitally, you can always undo something you don't like and you don't have to wash up your brushes after! LOL!

Ready to give it a try? Let's go! We are going to re-create my journaling page above, called "Trust". I picked this word for 2012 because I am finally learning to trust my instincts artistically, to create what calls to me and feel my way as I go. I am also learning to do this in my personal life....

{If you've purchased Christine and I's JYAO3 kit you are all set to follow along. If you haven't, don't worry, just follow along with whatever digital goodies you have on hand.}

First, open up the three backgrounds called nrj-paintedback1.jpg, nrj-paintedback2.jpg and nrj-collage2.png. Drag them all together into one Photoshop file and then crop it to 8.5 x 11 inches.

Arrange the backgrounds so they are in this order and set your layer blending modes and fill percentages as follows...

Layer 2, Hue: 100%

Layer 1, Multiply: 60%

Layer 0 (background) at 100%

 Your page will look like this...(feel free to play along with other blending modes and fills to get a look that YOU want!)

Now, open up the file called nrj-stitchedbag.png and drag it over the top most layer. Set your layer blend mode to Hard Light, Fill: 70%

Next, grab the painted heart in the file called "nrj-paintedelement6.png

Drag it onto the top most layer and set the layer blend mode to Overlay: 100%

And now your page looks like this! Pretty, huh? But, we are not done building our page yet...

Now we are going to get messy with some stitching! Got to your brush palette and load the stitching brush set that came with the kit... its called nrj-ch-stitches.abr. Add a circle stitching to the center of the main flower and build a row of flowers underneath the main flower.... don't forget the petals! :)

Next, we'll spruce up these flowers with some painted & stitched elements. Open up the following files: nrj-stitchedheart4.png, nrj-paintedheart1.png and nrj-stitchedflower1.png. Drag them over to our working .psd file.

Drag the yellow stitched heart underneath the far flower and reposition. Similarly, drag the blue painted heart underneath the stitched heart flower and resize/reposition.

Take the stitched flower and make it smaller, dragging it on the layer on top of the stitched heart flower. Center it on the heart. You could also bring in a circle or other stitched or painted heart. Do your own thing...play around until you are satisfied with the results.

For a few last touches, lets bring in the file called nrj-collagepiece3.png

And the file called CAH_AlteredBloomtwelve.png...

 

Take the layer with the collaged piece on it (the blue one with the word create) and pull it over to the lower left side behind the flower. Set the layer blend mode to Color Burn and set fill to 80%.

For the flower petal, pull it down underneath the flower clusters but above the backgrounds.  Center it over the heart near the word create. Leave the blend at Normal and fil at 100%.

So now our floral cluster should now look somewhat like this... but again feel free to experiment, make your own flowers and bring in your own shapes and elements.

One last touch we can do is to add a title to our journaling page. It's easy to do with Christines fun stamped alpha. Load the photoshop brush file called "CAH_AcrylicAlpha.abr"

Stamp a word in any color for your title (I used white on mine at an opacity of 82% for my word: Trust).

Save and print! Or add an element or two! Journal! Do whatever it is YOU want to do on your page. Have fun and experiment.. that is the best part!

Enjoy!
Nan

 

 

Frosty Fun Gift Tag Tutorial

Supplies:

- Frosty Fun Brushset and/or Frosty Fun gift tag freebie
- Watercolor crayons (or any kind of water colors)
- Inktense Pencils (or watercolor pencils)
- Faber Castell Gel Sticks (optional)
- Brush & Water (or refillable watercolor brush)
- Chalk accent inks (optional)
- Glitter (optional)

My new Frosty Fun photoshop brushes are the perfect accent to any winter scrapbook layout... but the possibilities for other uses are endless. You can make holiday cards, home decor projects (see my Halloween Decal tutorial from last year for a fun idea), or gift tags. If you want to get really creative, you can also print them out onto watercolor or acrylic paper and use them in your mixed media or paper crafting and painting projects. Today I'm going to show you how to make some sweet little gift tags using your painting supplies. Want to play along with me? Let's go!

To follow along with this tutorial, I've created a little set of gift tags for you using my Frosty Fun brushes. Go ahead and print them onto watercolor paper or heavy cardstock. For my tags, I used a heavy weight, laid cardstock in camel. The tags held the watercolor okay, but I think next time I would run some watercolor paper through my printer instead. Because towards the end the tags were buckling... but they still turned out okay.

Next, using your watercolor paints, add color to your tags. Get creative and have fun! If you goof up, you can always paint over it or just print another set out. Experiment with different mediums. For my tags, I primarily used my Inktense pencils which add a beautiful vivid color when you apply water. I also accented with my Faber-Castell gel sticks and my watercolor crayons.

Once you are done, cut out the tag shapes. For added depth and texture, I went over the edges of mine with some distressing chalk inks in various colors. You could also add some glitter. I didn't have any on hand, but may try that next time.

I added one of my finished tags to a gift  I'm giving tomorrow for the hostess of our annual Christmas party for the Hot Lunch Mamas! (a group of us that volunteer to serve lunch on Thursdays at Ellie's school!) She is an art teacher, so I think she'll like it....

I hope you enjoyed this quick and easy tutorial to add color to my photoshop brushes and to play outside of the "digital" world. It is so much fun and I find it deeply satisfying to be able to mix these two worlds.

Hugs!
N.

 

Creating your own Subway Art (and other new things!)

I am super excited to share a new downloadable workshop that I have today at CatScrap — SubWay Art! I have been taking a mixed media course with the amazing Christy Tomlinson. In her She Had Three Hearts art journaling course, she teaches so many techniques in that class that it would blow your mind! LOL!

One of the techniques she teaches is Image Transfer. It has a really cool effect, in that parts of the image that you are transferring will tear off in places and it gives it a perfectly distressed look. I've been wanting to make my own subway art for a while and I thought that image transfer would be the way to go. It's super messy but fun and in the end you have a really unique piece of art to hang in your home.

Here is my finished artwork. I've set it up on a shelf in my living room and it makes the perfect accent!

 

You can get this workshop today at CatScrap for 20% off!

In addition, last week I created a new set of Dreamy Photo Accents.

This set is number 4 and it's all about florals! Check out what our amazing creative team did with them...

I had some fun with these photo accents as well! I used them to create Thankfully Yours  art cards. You can print these out and frame them, use them as gift tags or place cards or even affix them to a bottle of wine for a fun gift. The possibilities are endless!

Hope you are having a great day whereever you are!
N.

 

Illustrator Tutorial: Quick and Easy Flowers

Have you ever sat and doodled flowers on your sketchpad, scanned them in, cleaned them up, smoothed them out and then made brushes with them or vectorized them?

Me too and it's a lengthy process—even though the results can be truly one-of-a-kind. But if you are in a hurry to create some cool looking flowers with Illustrator and your Wacom, then follow me!  

Note: I've included an Illustrator file with everything shown here so you could follow along on this tutorial. You can download it here.

First, open up a working space in Illustrator and using your mouse or Wacom, draw a petal. This can be anything you want. It doesn't even have to be a traditional flower petal like the one I drew below. Think outside the box!

Next, select the Rotate Tool from your Illustrator Toolbox...

Then, click on the very bottom center of your petal, until you see the cross-hair of the Rotate tool.

Now this is where the REAL fun begins! With the Rotate Tool selected, click on the bottom center of your petal. Next, holding down the Alt/Option key, click anywhere at the top area of the petal and pull down to right. Don't get frustrated if it takes you a few tries to get it. If you miss or something doesn't work right, just start over. Remember to click the rotate tool again and then click in the center of your petal and try again! It acutally took me a few minutes to get this the first time I tried!

Note: If you want an exact angle, also hold down the shift key (while holding the alt/opt and dragging). This will give you and exact measurement.

Once you've duplicated this first petal, simply hit Command (or Ctrl) D to repeat this transition. Keep hitting Command+D to duplicate and rotate your petals all the way around, until you are finshed and have the look you want.

When you're done, try changing the colors or adding some finishing touches to your flower!

 

Isn't that fun!? It can get addicting! This is how I created my doodle snowflakes as well...

Here, I used a simple leaf from my All For Fall Element Pack and repeated the process...

This time I did hold down the Shift Key, in addition to the Alt/Opt key to make sure I was keeping the angle contrained.

On this next flower, I did NOT hold down the shift key and just kept repeating the rotation/duplication (Cmd-D) to make a more imperfect flower.

Last I went back in and randomly recolored some of the petals and added a center flower for visual interest.

Making flowers, or snowflakes this way is a really fun and fast way to create some unique artwork that you can use over and over again!

Nancie

 

Art Journaling Challenge Week 2: Hope

We have been having so much over at CatScrap with our Art Journal Challenge. This is an 8 week challenge with each week having a different theme and a different gorgeous freebie created by the CatScrap designers. The idea is to get your feet wet with digital art journaling and at the end of the 8 weeks, you will have a finished album filled with your Hopes, Dreams, Goals & Schemes! Along the way, you can post your pages in our Art Journal gallery at CatScrap!

Last week, the challenge started over at Fiddlette's blog with her wonderful freebie! This week, I have a new art journal set for you! The theme is also Hope. You can grab the kit in the shoppe for free.

Creating a digital art journal is so much fun! The best part is there are no rules and if you don't like getting messy, making an art journal page in Photoshop is great because all the paint, brushes and grunge are virtual. Of course, there is always the UNDO button and eraser, unlike traditional art journaling! Ready to have some fun? Let's go!

I've created some extra grunge and paint brushes for you to use along with this tutorial. You can download them here. This is an .abr brush set in Pshop.

First open up the beautiful background that Christine created in her freebie last week. Then open up the blue painted background that was included in my download. Drag the blue background underneath Christine's journal background. Flip it so the flowers are on the bottom and adjust it.

Next, using your magic wand, select the bottom petals from the middle flower, copy and paste, then rotate and place it at the top so you get a whole flower.

Add a layer mask. Using one of the grungy brushes I gave you and with your color set to black,  "erase" the doodly parts away from the edges and any other parts from the bottom background to give it your own look.

If you want to change the color of the background blue layer or saturate it a bit, now is a good time! I changed the hue and lightness to make my blue background a bit more vibrant.

Now, using some more of the brushes, add some stems to your flowers, painted circles, and some text, with the text bruhes. Have fun! Remember, you don't have to do it exactly like I've done below. Add your own flair!

Adding different kinds of accents to your journal page truly makes it your own. It can also be a fun and healing process! You have two good friends when digital art journaling, your ERASER and CMD Z! (UNDO!)

Once you've got a look that you like, add the word hope, that is included in the download.

Next open up the envelope that came in the download, the one with the bird on it. Drag it over to your working file, but underneath group of flowers and elements we've created. Between the colored layer and bottom blue layer.

Next, using one of the acrylic paint brushes and some white "paint", let's paint over the bird in the envelope so it looks like we just slapped some gesso on there for real! I created a layer above my bird layer and "painted" around the bird and erased bits so just his head and some of his tail was peeking out!

To finish up, feel free to break out even more "brushes" and paint some more brush strokes or accents in varying colors to make this your own personal art journal! You can even add some journaling to this page as well.

Here is my finished piece.

This is my second page in my art journal and it makes me happy! I "HOPE" it does the same for you! tee hee!

Hugs!
Nan

Creating watercolor brushes in Illustrator

This week I put up two older brush sets of mine, Shmootzy Acrylic Frames and Get Creative with Paint. I have to say that the Get Creative set is a favorite of mine because I love the effect of watercolor and with 74 brush pieces the possibilities are endless. If you add Illustrator into the mix, it gets even better!

Lately, I have been enjoying creating my own illustrator brushes for doodling on my wacom tablet so I got to thinking about pulling in some of the brush strokes in my Get Creative set, into Illustrator to make watercolor brushes. I think they turned out pretty good, although dark in a few places.

Want to learn how to create your own watercolor brushes in Illustrator? Let's go! If you want to play along with this tutorial, you can grab the finished illustrator brushset here.

First, open up a Photoshop file (I did 12x12x300 dpi). Load the Get Creative Brushset by choosing Load Brushes from the brush palette.

Once you have the brushes loaded, choose some of the brush strokes from the set and on a New Layer, arrange them vertically, spacing them out from one another....

Then save this file off as a jpg...

Now open up Illustrator and place that jpg file into your document using File > Place

Now that the file is place into Illustrator, let's Trace & Expand our artwork. Because the watercolor strokes have such detail to them, we can't just use the default tracing options... Instead (making sure you have selected the jpg image), let's choose Object > Live Trace > Tracing Options

This will bring up our Tracing Options dialog box. Check the box that says Preview so we can see how our options will affect the finished trace. Choose Color 16 from the drop down menu for our Preset and click Trace. This is what it will look like. It doesn't look as smooth as in Photoshop but the watercolor detail will be there. If I did it again, I may play around and try and lighten up the dark spots because when we draw with these in Illustrator some of the spots are too dark.

These are traced but not expanded... click on the Expand button in the palette at the top of Illustrator.

Then UnGroup

Wait, we are not quite done... don't forget to select a white area on your brush (any white area), and choose >Select > Same Fill & Stroke and hit Delete. This will clear away any unwanted white areas.

Okay, now let's create our brushes!

Select the first stroke and then from the brushes palette in Illustrator click on that little down arrow and choose New Brush

Choose New Art Brush and click OK

In the Art Brush window, make sure to name your brushes and check the following...

Proportional, flip along the vertical and horizontal axis and make sure to choose Tints and Shades from the Colorization drop down menu. This is so that when you start doodling, your strokes will be in color.

Click OK. Do this for all the brush strokes that you want.

Once you have the finished brushes, hold down your Shift key and select them all, then from the Brush palette, choose >Save Brush Library. Give your brushes a name you'll remember and put them into the Brushes folder in Illustrator. Next time you want them, they will show up in your Brush Library for easy access.

It seems a bit tedious and alot of little steps, but the in end it is worth it because you can create your own brushes that don't look like anyone elses! Get out your favorite pens, markers and brushes and get scanning! It's so much fun.

Here is a few swirls and strokes that I made with my new watercolor brushes. These are also included in the download file that accompanies this tutorial..

ETA: Okay! So the dark parts were really bugging me! LOL! I went in and edited the brushes and instead of choosing Tints & Shades from the Colorization drop down menu, I chose just Tints and it really lightened up the overall affect. I like this softer look better, but you may like it the other way. Here is what it looks like lightened up...

 

Have a great weekend!

 

 

Fun with Shmootzy Frames!

Shmootzy (another word for messy!) frames are so much fun. You can use them as frames or tuck them behind photos, use as a space for journaling or even as masks. You can combine them with other frames, artwork or masks to make some really unique frames of your own!

I'll show you how I created the frame below, by combining all 8 of my new Shmootzy Romance Frames

First, open up a small workspace in Photoshop and you can either open up all the .png files that came with the Shmootzies and then drag them over onto your workspace (remember to hold down the shift key to center), OR you can load the brushset (.abr) and individually stamp them, either on their own layers or one on top of the other, rotating and resizing, until you get the effect you want.

For my combo frame, I just dragged all the .png files and then centered them, or rotated them until I had this organic and interesting looking thing below!

Put all your layers into a group. We are going to make a cutout in the center of this graphic so you can actually use it as a frame (but if you want it as a mask you could always leave it alone or further embellish the center).

Next, make a Layer Mask for the Group. Load up some solid square brushes, grungy brushes, or paint strokes. For this example, I loaded my Polaroid Transfer Mask brushes. I picked a square brush and a solid black paint color and "stamped" in the center of my Layer Mask, where I wanted the cutout to appear.

And that's it! Save your frame as a brush, or .png file or make more! It's fun to play around and come up with unique creations of your own!

Don't forget you can download my finished frame here.

Have a great night!

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

 

 

Video Tutorial: How to use my PDQ Overlays...

Hi there! I have got two new products up this week at CatScrap. I made some fun wordart called StoryStarts Vol.1 : The Real Story. In addition, I've put up my latest PDQ (Pretty Darn Quick) Overlays. These are Vol. 11 and they are based on some painted backgrounds I created. I have also put up two previous PDQ collections: Volume 9:Altered and Volume 10: Collage.

When I first created this series of overlays, I meant for them to be used by scrapbookers as a way to quickly come up with a solid color background for their pages. When I paper scrapped, I always had a stack of colored Bazzil papers that I used as a background for my layout. This was the thought behind making these — only instead I wanted to give the scrapper a solid color background with a bit of distressing and texture. As I began to create more, I had professional designers requesting them to use in creating their own papers, so I began to make them CU (Commercial Use) friendly.

 

I made this video tutorial for my scrapper friends to show them that my PDQ Overlays are not just for commercial use and how you can quickly and easily create a rich coordinating background paper for your layouts.

I hope you enjoy it!
Hugs!