Journal Cards Tutorial - Summer School Week 2

Hello! In this tutorial I want to share some ideas for using journal cards other than for journaling, in pocket and scrapbook pages. I use Photoshop CS5, but these are simple techniques that I hope you’ll be able to easily translate to your own software. Also, one disclaimer: keep in mind that there are several ways to do the same thing in Photoshop; I’ll be showing you how I do things, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a faster/easier/better way to do things.
The pages I will use to illustrate these techniques are made using some recent Memory Pockets Monthly collections (you can click on the pages to view the full credits in the gallery).

1. Use journal cards as design elements

Let’s start with the simplest thing you can do: you can use your journal cards as papers or word art.

You can arrange them on your layout, or just use one to make a statement. Here are two examples.





Also, don’t be afraid to cut the cards up to use just a piece, like I did on this page.



Here I cut out a portion of the card using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, then layered the elements and photo on top.





Whenever I want to cut out a portion that is not a square or a rectangle, I use the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Here’s an example of how I would have used it on this card if I wanted a wonkier look. You just click at the four corners to make the selection, and you are all set.





2. Extract word art or brushes from a journal card

This is one of my favorite ways to stretch my supplies even further. On these two pages, I turned some journal cards into brushes.





The easiest way for me to extract a brush or word art from a card is using the Magic Wand tool.

Magic Wand – make sure the “contiguous” option is unchecked so you’ll be able to select the everything at the same time. If the background of your card is plain, like in this case, you can simply click on the background using the Magic Wand tool. Once it is selected, just hit the delete key, and you are left with the brush.


You can then further refine the selection using the Polygonal Lasso Tool.



You can see how I used the entire brush on the top left corner of my page, and then just this portion on the bottom right.

Here’s another example of this technique being used on two different cards for this page. I used the word art in the background next to my photo, and the flowers to decorate two corners of the page.



3. Blend the journal cards on your background
Blending works great on brushes you extract from journal cards.
Last week’s blending tutorial from @AnneOfAlamo has a wealth of information on the different blending options available in Photoshop. Another way I like to do the blending is using the Blending Options under the layer effects (this is also my go-to technique to blend fonts on a background and make sure they don’t float).



All I did for this example was move the dark slider over to the right, until I got the effect I wanted.



Here’s a direct before and after comparison.



I hope you’ve learned something new, and will make even more use of your journal cards now!