HYBRID | PHOTO FRAME

Several months ago, Mirjam sent me an idea she found on Pinterest for another fun hybrid project: a paper photo frame.

As a matter pf fact you can find several sketches and guidelines for different kind of frames there. I chose the pattern from Inna's creations.



I printed the pattern and cut it out:


I cut the pattern from a beautiful paper from Sprung | Papers


The next step is to fold the borders to build the frame:






And that is it!

I decided to decorate my frame with photos of my children and a few elements.






Products used: black tag Brand New Year, Brad "&" Brand New Year, leaves cut from a paper from Drawn to You, WA smile from Spring Flutters




As always I hope you enjoyed my post and if I inspired you in any way, shape or form then by all means make a photo of your project and upload it to your gallery so you can leave a link in the comment section below! I'd love to see what you made!

BLOG CHALLENGE | MARCH

Hi Everyone, Karen here.

Hope we are all settled in to 2019 and the weather is improving where you are!

Ok, both nervous (a little) and excited (a lot) about this months challenge as it is my first ever attempt at a template! But before we share the new challenge details, we have the winner for the February template challenge picked! The quality of entries was fabulous as always! If you want to take a peek at all the lovely entries, you can find them HERE.

The lucky winner for this month is Nessita!!!

Congratulations Nessita aka Ági!!! You have a notification on your TLP account.
All other participants also received their 25% discount coupons via their Lilypad accounts. Please make sure you check your messages everyone and if your coupon didn't come through send an e-mail to pinkreptiledesigns at gmail dot com!

Here's Nessita's gorgeous page:

Onto the challenge - as it is my first template I have kept it to one photo, although feel free to put in more if that suits your page! As always with our challenges the template is a freebie that you can twist, shake and/or turn it around! Use it as is or make it your own! Just click on the image to grab it!

Here's what the lovely Pink Ladies made with this template:

by Karen


by Marilyn


by Ellen


by Diane


by Kate


by Gaëlle


by Marijke


by Rikki


by Stacia



Now it's your turn to play with this template! You have no idea how happy I will be to see what you all come up with!!

Make sure you use at least 75% of Pink Reptile Design products on your page. Once completed, just upload your page to one or all of your galleries and post a link to your layout in the comments section of this post before the next challenge goes live on April 15th.

ONE favorite page will be chosen as the winner to receive a 10 dollar coupon to the PRD store, but really everyone is a winner, as all other participants receive a 25% discount coupon to the Pink Reptile Designs TLP store. So all the more reason to join in on the fun, right?!

Have fun making memories and Happy Scrapping!

INSPIRATION | FLOWER EMBELLISHMENTS FROM PAPERS

Hey everyone! Jenn here with a quick trick to get some pretty, custom flourishes on your digital pages. I was asked which kit the flowers came from on this page I made for the Feb Blog Challenge Template Freebie and the answer is ... two of those flowers came from paper packs!

So I thought I'd make today's post about this subject ... don't overlook your patterned papers as a way to embellish your pages.

The flowers in the corners/on the edges are from a stamp found in Today Elements and then made into a sticker.
The yellow flower is cut from an older kit collab Handmade with Love with Studio Basic.
The orange flower is cut from the XOXO paper pack.

Here is a great sampling of Pink Reptile's Designs beautiful patterns (the Handmade with Love paper is a Studio 68 paper) to cut flowers from:

When I cut my flowers from papers I usually do it one of two ways depending on the background. If the background is textured, I'll usually use the Quick Selection Mask (I make the brush size really tiny. Use the Bracket Keys on your keyboard to make the brush [ smaller or ] bigger quickly.) Here's the XOXO paper and the orange flower I want to cut from the textured background.

Once you select the Quick Selection tool - you use it like a brush and start brushing over pixels of the flower. You will see marching ants around everything your brush is selecting. The three buttons in the tool bar let you 1) Select pixels 2) Add to the selection (to refine it and pick up anything you missed) 3) Subtract from the selection (to refine it and remove pixels that you don't want included).

Here is my selection:

To make it into a sticker: Select all of the flower (command click on the thumbnail in the layer palette - CTRL Click on a PC). This will place marching ants around your flower. But we need a bit of border around it so go to Select > Modify > Expand and choose the # of pixels for your sticker border. I chose 9 pixels. Then add a new layer under the flower. Pick a color as your foreground (this will be the sticker background color). Making sure you are on the new layer you created (which needs to be under the flower layer) use the paint can to fill the new layer with that color. It will only fill in the area within the marching ants.

Here is my finished sticker cut from the pattern paper and ready to use on my page as a beautiful embellishment!

The other way I cut my flowers is using the Magic Wand Tool. I use this method if the background is fairly solid and not as textured. Also if the flower (or item I want to extract) has a strong defining edge like the flowers on this Garden Party paper:

I make sure Contiguous is checked in the Tool Bar. So if there is any of that white/cream color within the flower - it will stay part of the flower and not be extracted as the background. I click on the background to select all the white/cream pixels. Then I go to Select > Inverse. This puts the marching ants around everything this is NOT the background (ie the flowers!). I do Command J (control J on a PC ) to duplicate the flowers onto a new layer. I can turn off the visibility on the original paper layer now (or just delete it) and just work on the extracted flower layer.

And now I can use a tool to cut the flower piece that I want out. I usually just use the Polygon tool and draw around the flower. I use Command J (or Control J on a PC) to duplicate that piece on its own layer.

And then I can make this new cut out flower into a sticker by following the same method as mentioned above - selecting all the pixels, expanding them, adding a new layer underneath, filling in that new layer with a background color. Here is my finished flower sticker cut from the Garden Party paper.

Until next time!

TUTORIAL | CUSTOMIZE YOUR WORKSPACE

 Last month, we focused on general preferences for Adobe Photoshop CC. This time, we’ll talk about setting up a more personalized workspace. Many of us digitally scrapbook for quite a while using the default workspace without even thinking to customize it at all, or knowing that we could. I know when I first started scrapbooking using a laptop computer there weren’t many ways to change up my space just due to the limited amount of visibility on a smaller screen. Often, we now have widescreen monitors and you can definitely make the workspace a lot more scrap friendly with just a few steps.

Let’s start with the default workspace:



If you pull down the Window tab at the top, you’ll notice the items with checkmarks are the ones that appear in the panel along the right hand side.



You’ll notice a small strip on the right docked next to the main long panel with a couple of icons in it. Hovering over the icons, you’ll see it’s the History panel and the Properties panel. I like scrapping with the History panel open but the Properties tab isn’t necessary (for me). Now that you can undo multiple times with Ctrl Z instead of just one, perhaps I’ll stop using the History panel but for now I’m used to it.



NOTE: It used to frustrate me that the Properties panel would pop back up whenever I drew a shape and I would have to hide it again. There is a fix for that! WITH A SHAPE DRAWN on a layer, you can click on the little three line/option menu and uncheck Show on Shape Creation, then close the tab group and it won’t automatically reappear.



Because I have a wide screen monitor and I scrap in a 12 x 12 square format, I have plenty of screen “real estate” for another wide panel on the right instead of just the skinny strip holding the extra panels. So using the Windows tab at the top I’ll open up several other panels that I use all the time like Styles, Actions, Brushes and Settings, as well as Characters and Paragraphs for text.



Notice the little dividing lines between every icon or two. Those dividers show how the panels will be displayed. Those with two icons between dividers will be “nested” together in one panel such that you can switch back and forth. I use those when it makes sense to do it like with Characters and Character Styles. You can move them up and down and change the order to your preference.

Now, I’ll expand the small strip into another large vertical panel by clicking the two tiny arrows at the top of the skinny strip. I could even make these two vertical panels thinner and add a third if I wanted to open more panel options.



Now THAT’S better! I’ll have a much easier time scrapping when I can see everything I use most often. I just have one problem… that Layers palette is WAY too small! You end up with so many layers in a psd/tif file and scrolling up and down is tedious. So I’ll move the Styles panel over into the other tools panel.



This will make it much easier to navigate around on a scrapbook layout!



My last step is to move the Tools bar from the left hand side over and dock it next to the rest of the panels. Now, the entire left side of my workspace is dedicated to my layouts and all of my tools etc are on the right. No more going back and forth across the screen.

9full screen tools moved by Stacia, on Flickr

One other customization that I’ve made in order to see my layers better is to change a couple of those panel options. Click on the three line/option menu and select Panel Options.



I like the largest thumbnail size but that is totally personal preference. I also LOVE the layer bounds option checked. That way I can see much more clearly what layer that I’m on by seeing the shapes on layers more easily. I also use the add “copy” to duplicates option so that it’s easier to differentiate between original elements like flowers and their copies when I start resizing and moving them.



I hope you picked up a few helpful tips that you can use for your own customization. Note that HOW you set up your workspace is totally dependent on your workflow and which tools you use most frequently. So move things around, try out different options. You might even consider having a workspace for digital scrapbooking AND another workspace configured differently for photo-editing if that’s your thing. The important thing is to SAVE your customized workspace so that you can get it back in case your system is somehow reset during an update. { Not like that ever happens, right…? ;) }



To save your customized workspace - under the Windows tab, selecting Workspace, pull down to New Workspace. You’ll get a dialog box asking you to give your new workspace a name. You’ll also have the option to save customized keyboard shortcuts and tool options as well if you so choose.

Tell me, have you customized your workspace? What’s the thing you love the most about it?