IMP Design Team Melinda Staley | You Shine
Melinda here today on the blog, showing off my second page for the month with the simple elegance of Dunia Designs Shine kit. A lot of things are almost “back to normal” these days, or at least what seems like something that is almost normal. Functions are going ahead as scheduled for the most part, but some activities are still having to play a bit of catch up if they were in the earlier part of the school year. That was the case for the end of the season banquet for my daughter’s college marching band. It was scheduled to happen right at the beginning of the Spring semester and then it had to be delayed. But they finally got to have it, and she was able to dress up a bit with her friends and enjoy an evening ‘out’ with them. Like earlier in the month, she was good enough to take some fun photos with her friends and then send them to me so I could share in the fun just a little too.
Let’s go over some of the design choices I made while making my page.
I placed visual triangles on the page with the white flowers and gold leaf title and tag elements (gold leaf elements are from a retired Traci Reed kit Rich in Love). The gold swirls I placed throughout the page give some visual repetition as well as customization of the premade cards.
Like I did on my childhood birthday page a few months back I used one of the Dunia Designs 3×4 Basics Vol. 1 templates to combine two photos for a single 4×6 photo card spot, and I put a square photo to one side of 4×6 card spot and left room for journaling and embellishing in the ‘bare’ part of the pocket.
I made a decorated strip for the date by masking out the word ‘shine’ from a png element and using a blank spot on one of the kit cards for the paper back so that it was coordinating with the paper style used throughout the page.
Finally I wanted to go over how to make custom shadowed objects in Photoshop Elements since I used this technique on both of my pages this month. While it isn’t as quick as it can be done in Photoshop, don’t let not having the full-blown program keep you from doing this. It isn’t hard, especially if you have the latest version of Photoshop Elements (2022) that now includes the warp tool. PSE scrapbookers have been asking for this particular tool for years and they finally added it!
First you need your shadow on its own layer. You can create your own shadow layer, or using this neat trick shown in a tutorial video in PSE 11 by Cheryl Ashcraft you can separate a layer style shadow. Cheryl also gives instructions in the video on using the smudge tool to warp the separated shadow layer, if you don’t have PSE 2022.
Once you have a separate shadow layer you:
- Choose the correct layer in the layer palette. Activate the Transform tool by hovering the move tool near a corner of the selected object. When the pointer changes to a double-head arrow, left-click and the object will have a transform box around it.
- Choose the Warp Mode option from the Tool Options menu at the bottom of the work area.
Note: Using CTRL+T to activate the transform tool does not give you the warp tool in the tool options menu for some reason. - Move the edge handles and push areas within the selected object to warp parts of the element and create uneven shadows for a more realistic look.
Have fun warping those shadows!
Detailed credits for all pages can be found on my IMP 2022 Pages Pinterest Board.