Like most digital products, frames can be used in a multitude of ways. You can recolor, resize, texturize and reshape, to name a few ways you can alter them. Let me show you some ways to alter these frames, available at The Lilypad store. I will also show you how to use a set of Mommyish styles with your frames.
Using a few frames from “Phrames”, I’ve applied 3 styles from the Roar Layer Styles collection and applied a color overlay to one frame.
As you can see, applying a style and/or color gives a frame a completely different look. Here are my two favorite ways to color doodle frames. As these types of frames often have open ended lines, I don’t like to apply heavy color, depositing solid color lines where there might not be a frame line, much preferring to color lightly inside the doodle, building up the color as I build up brush strokes. In the second example, I locked the transparent pixels (above layers palette you will see “lock” and a box beside it, check that, then you will see the locked symbol in your layer) and brushed color overtop of the doodle frame.
A fun way to use frames is to stack them. In this sample, I duplicated the frame and my photo so that I could layer one over the other. In the underlying frame I cropped the photo differently, so it appears to be a second photo, but this is not necessary. The two frame/photos were tilted in opposite directions.
The choices are endless when it comes to uses brushes on a frame. I like to use tone-on-tone with just a slight color variation from the frame color. For my sample, I used three of Dawn Inskip’s brushes: edge brush, paint splatter brush, texture brush. Stamp overtop of your frame, erasing any spill over or lock the transparent pixels (explained above).
Here’s a page I created, using a frame that I applied a glossy style to.
Frames are a great way to add impact to your photo and are very useful in your page design. I hope that some of these ideas pique your interest and the next time you use a frame, you will personalize it to your taste.
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