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Back in the day, I used to be one heck of a paper-crafter, if I do say so myself.  I could crank out 300 paper scrapbook layouts a year, and I made cards that would make Hallmark cry.  As I started morphing into the hybrid world of combining both paper crafting with digital elements created on my computer, I kept moving more and more to the digital side.

Finally, about three years ago, I quit paper crafting all together. I sold most of my scrapbooking supplies, and went back to scouring the card aisle at my local Target. While my family and friends might miss my glitter-and-ribbon-laden card confections, I don’t miss it at all (okay, I still love glitter and I do kind of miss that a bit).

Now I create cards in Photoshop or Illustrator, and take advantage of my awesometastic Epson R1900 wide format photo printer to create cards and invitations.  I’ll be creating a wedding program in a week or so, so remind me to share that with you too

Andie’s DoDads can help former paper crafters like me create a card digitally with a bit more of that three-dimensional feel that I still love.  I created this card last night.  Now there’s no real theme here, I just wanted to show you what you can do with just a bit of embellishment.  Here’s what I did:

1. Exported the photo from Lightroom into Photoshop
2. Created a 5X7 blank canvas
3. Used a damask background from Andie’s Ashley River Road collection and recolored it to match the greens in my photo, then drug it onto the blank canvas and resized it appropriately
4. Drug the photo on to the card canvas and added one of Andie’s Rachel textures.  I changed the style to Overlay, and used a layer mask to customize it a bit
5. Added some DoDads from Andie’s Rhonna DoDads, and resized as necessary
6. Added a few drop shadows, and some text
7. Flattened card and saved as a .jpg for print.

Here is the final result:

And that’s it~ really, it took me five minutes, and I added more steps with the overlay and the masking than you might want or need to do.

So go ahead, wow your friends and family. You know you want to!

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I am really loving these NEW Rachel Textures!  They are stunning before you even add them to your image and the are easy as pie to use.  Enough of my rambling … here’s another preview ….

My before image:

Such a little cutie with his half smile!  Here it is with the color texture added:

I set the texture to “Hard Light” mode at 75% opacity.  Here it is as a yummy B&W:

I think I especially love the textures in B&W.

I hope this gets your motivated to try something new!  It can really spark your creativity.

Tabitha

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I haven’t jumped onto the texture band wagon yet, but I might try to find me a seat now!  I think I have found one of my favorite new textures … The newly added Rachel Textures! As soon as I saw this new set, especially the first texture in the set, I got SO exctied and had to try them out.  I am SO glad I did.  The texture has multiple colors and is subtle yet really unique.  Here is my before picture:

Here it is with the texture at 100% in the Soft Light Mode:

I just used the eraser tool at 50% and 25% to gently remove the texture for the face, neck and hair.  I left just a tad of the texture around all the edges so that it blended into the background.  Don’t you just love it?!?

Then I thought … This would be awesome as a B&W image:

Isn’t that Yummy!!  So simple too.  I just followed Andie’s tutorial and Ta-Da!

I am so in love!

Tabitha