Image Map

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Newest logo design!

Hey!

I wanted to pop in real quick today and let you know that I finished up another logo package! This one went really fast because Heather and I were online at the same time and able to shoot e-mails back and forth and get the drafts finalized very quickly! LOL! But here is her finished product!

Her logo:

Her blog header:

(You will notice I have her links on there. I also sent her an html code of the image maps so that you can click on each part to go there! )
Her Facebook Cover:

Her Store Front:


I can add textures or leave it without for a more internet classic look that works well, too! 

You can contact me for your own custom logo today! Check out my package and pricing details here.
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Friday, March 9, 2012

Another Blending Tutorial

Hey scrappers!

There is a lot I could tell you about blending modes so I'm going to make my tutorials around that for now and keep each tutorial simple by just adding a couple of tidbits here and there.

Another helpful blending mode I want to tell you about is hard light. I use hard light on shiny elements.

You can find hard light in the same menu as overlay. Below I have a side-by-side comparison of an element where I clipped a paper to a bullnose clip (from Rachel's Scraps) and then I duplicated the bull nose clip, de-saturated it (you know how to do that, right? grey scale a color element?) and then made it an overlay using hard light and then overlay so you could see the difference.


 Notice that with the overlay, the shadowy areas are not very shadowy (as you noticed from the blending mode on papers tutorial). Hard light does a great job of letting those shadows show through, giving more depth to the element. You might notice that the hardlight seems a little less bright. I would just merge all the elements and then boost the saturation on the whole element aftwerwards. Overall, the hard light was a more effective blend mode for this element.

Other elements that hard light works well on are buttons, gems, shiny string and any other shiny elements that have a glare. You will find that sometimes the overlay colors the hilights and it just doesn't look natural.

One other thing about blending modes I wanted to bring up today is about clipping your overlay layers to the shapes.

In the picture below, you will see the original clip layer, a clipping mask with my pattern, and then a clipping mask with the overlay layer. You make lots of clipping masks onto one element and you want to do this because with the duplication of the same element, they can sometimes get this outline and you don't want that. So make it a habit of clipping them all together!





Next week I hope to get a tutorial to you about selectively recoloring an element, meaning elements with different colors.

Till then, Happy Scrapping & Designing!
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Friday, March 2, 2012

Designer Tutorial: Blend Modes

I know there are a lot of designer tutorials out there but I thought I would add my own 2 cents out there!

Today I wanted to share with you about blending modes. They're the magic of what happens with digi-scrapping!

First, where are they? For me in PS they are right above the layers in the layers palette.


You probably are familiar with the Overlay mode but that's not the only one and sometimes not the best!!

Have you ever tried to do an overlay on white paper? Doesn't work! So here's my trick with white papers and really any light-colored paper in general.

First, I want to show you what I mean about the overlay not working. I have here a green paper and I took a crafty paper and did blend mode overlay:

Yuck! not very realistic, there's not a lot of definition and the shadow area is just a darker green and not really a gray. So, we try duplicating the overlay layer. Sometimes that helps add more definition but it can add too much definition......

Yikes! too sharp! It will lighten the whole paper and creates too much of a hi-light! So maybe we can just decrease the opacity on that 2nd overlay layer to around 60%?

Hmmm, areas are still too bright and there's not much definition in them... So here's what I do. Make the top duplicate layer of your texture Overlay @ 100% and then make the bottom duplicate Linear Burn @ 20-30%. This is how you do white papers! I would do both layers. Overlay on top of the Linear Burn layer. If you find this makes your paper darker than you want, change the brightness of the Linear Burn layer. Now see my green paper:
Much better! I have a hi-light on my crinkle and some better definition in my shadowy area! Use this trick on any white or light papers.


Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

Happy DESIGNING!
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