Tutorial: Stroking a Path

Hey everyone! Sorry about no tutorial last week, it took everything from me to whip out the HUGE Boys and Girls Mega Bundle and I was just wiped out!

Anyways! I wanted to show you something I LOVE doing to add cute little dot borders to shapes.

First,  start with the shape you want to add a border to. Make sure it is rastersized.

Next,  use the magic wand to select the shape and you'll get marching ants around the shape.

Next,  go to Select-->Modify---> Contract (Should be from menus at the top)

In there, you can choose any value you want, I generally go between 20-50, you can always undo and try again or do Expand to go back out.

Now,   create a new layer above your shape layer, go to the paths palette and click on the button at the bottom that says " Make work path from selection".

The marching ants will now go to a solid line.

Next, click on the brushes and find your basic round brush. Hold it over your shape to check it's the size you want and change as needed.

Then, find the brushes palette,  and go to "Brush Tip Shape". Here is where we make it fun!

We adjust the spacing so the dots make a trail instead of a line. I usually adjust the spacing to around 200% or more. You can play around with it and undo and go back til you get what you like.

Then, click on "Stroke path with brush". Check that it's as you want. If not, click undo and mess with the spacing until you get what you like.

Then, it's important that you delete the path otherwise that line will persist in your shape. So click on the little trash can to delete the path. Your dots will remain.

Then, since you made the path it's own layer, you can easily re-color your dots if you change your mind.

You can also make fun dot trails by just free-hand painting on your canvas:

Hope this was helpful and new to you!

Happy Scrapping and have a great weekend!

Tutorial: Recoloring Elements

Hey everyone! Sorry I haven't done a tutorial in a while! It's been a little busy around here!

Today I wanted to show you some different ways of recoloring elements rather than just doing an overlay. Some elements are also multi-toned so you don't want to just go to hue-saturation and change the whole thing. You'll get funky colors that way.

I often use a combination of the different select tools in Photoshop. Here's one way.

1. First, you will see I have this cool two-toned button from Miss Tiina. If I de-sat it and then do an overlay, I won't have two colors anymore! So I want to do this differently.

In the above screen shot you can see the color palette I am working with and the button. I want to make the red green and change the tone of the blue a little.

2. I start by going to the Select menu from the top. From there, choose color range. This option works best with primary colors like yellow, red and blue because if you select the yellows and you have a green, it's going to select the yellow out of the green. But you can play around with the options.

3. Here you can see where I asked it to select the reds. You're given a preview of the areas it will select with marching ants.

4. Here you can see those marching ants. It didn't get the inside shadows of the button to well and those have some reds, too. So here, I go to me regular select wand and select the + sign to add some areas to the selection. I decided to select all the white area, too.

5. Here you can see where I have that area selected, leaving the blue circle in the middle.

6. Now go into Image- Adjustments- Hue/Saturation and play around until you get the shade you want.

7. For the blue circle, I couldn't get the screen capture to work but right-click on your selection. A drop-down menu will pop up. Choose "Select Inverse". Now the blue circle is selected, and I went through the same steps Image-Adjustments-Hue/Saturation and played with the settings until I got this:

Voila! With flowers, I have often selected the center and copy-pasted it so it will stay brown or whatever color and not get the overlay. These little changes can help make your elements pop!

Here's an example of a flower that is pretty difficult to recolor but with selective recoloring, it can look a lot more natural!