Almost any digital product can be used as a stamp to create a background. Brushes, paper, overlays, etc, these can all be used as is or altered to create a background which you can customize in so many ways. Let me share some ways to use your digital products to stamp onto a background to create a layer.
For my stamped background, I first chose four products from Dawn Inskip’s Live For Today Mixed Media Papers and Lynn Grieveson Designs’ Accounted For Brushes.
Here are the layers.
I opened two two papers and added a fill layer (with cream color) and changed opacity to 50%. This created a soft colored neutral base to apply the darker tones of the mixed media papers overtop. On the mixed media papers, I changed the blend mode to overlay and darker color. When creating a background with multiple layers, I change the blend modes to see how the selected layer interacts with the underlying layers for each mode. Often times, I choose darker color or multiple, overlay or soft light but there is no right or wrong choice; it is a personal preference as to what effect you want to create and there aren’t any blend modes I don’t ever use, they are all useful at one time or another in a design.
With the two brushes, I stamped overtop of my paper layers, duplicated one of them, moved it and then erased bits off of all of them, anywhere where a layer overlapped the underlying layer(s) creating too much clutter. To duplicate a layer, drag the layer down to the bottom of the layers palette and drop it onto the layers icon (second icon from the right in Photoshop). These two layers now are independent of each other and can be moved/manipulated in different ways (change blend mode, resize, move, recolor, etc).
Until I am sure I’m satisfied with my stamped design, I save my project as a PSD so it preserves all the layers, allowing me to go back and make any additional changes, as desired. My final step is to view the background stamping and create a mask on any layer I wish to brush off (erase) any areas I want to hide or a quicker way is to select the erase brush and simply erase any unwanted areas but I prefer to use a mask as the changes are then non-destructable and I can brush back any areas if I decide to.
Another quick way to eliminate or blend parts of a stamp is to select (I like to use the lasso tool) the area you wish to blend and in Photoshop, select Edit > Fill and from the drop down menu beside Contents, select content-aware (be sure to make your selection first before you try this because the content-aware option will be grayed out if you haven’t made a selection first). Sometimes, this needs to be done a few times before it blends in a manner that pleases you. You can create an action which will run the content-aware fill command which saves time. I applied a shortcut key to my action so I just have to hit Shift-F2 and it runs the action for me. (I like time saving actions such as this).
When you have finished your background stamping and saved as a jpeg file, then it can be added to your project, such as a layout, journal card, greeting card, etc. It can be moved, resized, recolored, change blend mode, apply a color overlay, etc. There are so many possibilities. Try stamping along the edge, duplicating and rotating it, change the opacity and color of each duplication.
For my layout, I started with a neutral background paper and then added the stamped background layers overtop, erasing some it and moving other areas around on my page. I added some transfers from Lynn Grieveson’s Textual Layered Transfers 3 and changed the blend mode.
I hope that I have inspired you to look at your digital products and combine multiple stamped layers to create your own unique background.
Leave a Reply