Petra here, aka Sugar& Spice, good evening and apologies for my late post. I’d like to share a couple of techniques with you, which are so quick and effective. I use mainly PSE 5, so the instructions may be different for your programme. (I used Amy’s latest releases, Who Village Elements and Who Village Papers). First up, is a quick and easy out of bounds.
Place your photo above a square in the template. (I used Amy’s Say it a 100 Ways Template). Click on the small preview thumbnail of the square, in the layers palate. You should see the marching ants on your photo, as you can see in mine below. Now select your photo, so that it is highlighted as the active layer. Go to your menu bar and click on Select and then Inverse on the drop down menu (Shift + CTRL + I).
Using your eraser brush, erase all the areas outside the square, except those you want to have as your out of bounds. A steady hand is useful here. Trim away until you get the required result.
Deselect your ‘marching ants’ when your finished (CTRL +D) and re-decorate your page, as you wish. I decided the green background was too dark and changed it to red and pink.
My page looks a bit bare and there isn’t really any room for journaling so I decided to make some quick and easy word art. I used a CU font by That Girl & Darcy Baldwin to bring you a 2nd quick technique.
Write out your word and create a new blank layer underneath. Once again click on the thumbnail of the text to get your marching ants. Now select your blank layer underneath and go to Edit in your menu bar, at the top. Click on Stroke, in the drop down menu. This should bring up a dialogue box, similar to the one below. You may want to change the settings but I used a stroke of 20 pixels, centred and chose the colour of my background paper as a contrast. click OK when you’re happy with it. Deselect your text (CTRL + D) and simplify it. Merge it with your new stroke layer below. And there you go, a quick and easy focal point for your page.
And after adding some more bits and pieces, here is my finished page.
And for being so patient, here is a page cluster taken from my page above. It is shadowed but I’ve included the shadow settings in the zip, should you wish to match them to your page.
Click HERE or the preview to download from Box.net.
Leave some comments/love if you would like some more similar handy hints or just like my freebie. Have a fun weekend!
