Tips and Tricks: Cutouts!

Something I have been seeing a lot of in the past few months have been cutouts! This technique mimics the effect of punching something out of paper and letting the background paper show.

There are a ton of templates in the shop featuring cutouts, and here are a few of them.

Here are some fabulous ones from Amy Martin. In fact, she has an entire series of templates with cutouts!

And here’s a set by Sara that has a fun fun FUN template with a cutout that has little circles peeking out behind it. How cute!

One of my favorite uses of this technique, however, is actually for titles. So I’m going to show you one of the ways I achieve this effect using layer masks.

Here is a layout that I finished, except for the title, which I want to put on that brown tab.

Next I typed out my title in my desired font and put it where I wanted it.

Then I selected everything except the text, making sure to have the continuous button unchecked so the insides of my letters were selected too.

Then I clicked on the button at the bottom of my layers panel to add a layer mask.

Next I made the text layer invisible and took my layer mask, which masks ONLY my text, and dragged it onto the layer I want the cutout on (in this case the brown tab)

And that’s all! My favorite part about this technique is it is super easy to move the cutout around. Just use the marquee tool to select the cutout area and move it around. Since you’re masking, you didn’t actually delete any of the paper below, which is another way to achieve the same effect.

Here is my final layout, using Everyday by Krista and Grow With Love Letters Edition: April by Sara and Crystal

Hope that was helpful!!