heArt 101: Digital Scrapbook or Collage Freebies Plus Tutorial Saturday, Dec 29 2007

This heart art is my attempt at digital scrapbooking. Below are some of the details as to how I created it, as well as a background and a couple of heart elements free for the taking. Note: If it has heartaday written on it, don’t take it. In fact, if you take the freebies and use them (I’d love attribution), send it to me and I’ll feature it here in an entry in the future.

When I was getting my art degree, one of the professors drilled into our heads “less is more”. I try to abide by that, but I tend to lean towards chaos, adding more and more in a desperate attempt to make it better. My inner critic doesn’t like this piece very much as a whole, but I decided to post it anyway. I read somewhere that sometimes we don’t do art for ourselves, but for someone in our audience in an intuitive sort of way. That gives me some comfort here.

Those of you that think the text is a rip off of the I Can Has Cheezburger blog, you’re right. I can’t get enough of that! It’s my own cat sitting on my parlor grand piano.

Below is the abbreviated version of how I did this all in Photoshop. Now, I don’t claim to be an expert at Photoshop by any means so if I’m doing something “wrong” to any PS geeks out there, let it go. This is my messy way of doing things.

Mini Tutorial

I started out with the flower picture below which is a macro photo I took of a common weed in the yard I call Creeping Charlie (also known as ground ivy). Noxious weed, beautiful glow-in-the-twilight lavender flowers. I’d retouched this photo at an earlier time.

Then I did two things to it in Photoshop. First I duplicated the layer and then went to Filter>Blur>Motion and blurred it diagonally beyond recognition, after which I went to Filter>Distort>Shear and messed around with it until I ended up with this:

If you’d like to take this background and use it, click on it to make it the maximum size, which will open a new window, and then right click on it and choose Save Image As.

The second thing I did with the original image, duplicating the layer again applying Filter>Texture>Stained Glass. The color of the “grout” is whatever color you have set as your foreground color and mine happened to be moss green at the time. Below is the result. I think it looks like a needlepoint pillow.

I took this layer and put it just above the background layer, after which I played Layer Style>Blending Options to meld the two layers, giving me this:

The hearts I made using the shape tool and the heart shape. I applied Gradient, Bevel & Emboss, Texture, and Stroke (outline) Layer Styles. Below are just the hearts by themselves for you to use. Sorry I don’t have them downloadable in .PNG form so you have transparent backgrounds, but I just don’t have the energy to figure out how to set that up right now. If someone knows how I can do that, let me know. At any rate, just use the Magic Eraser to erase the white background and you’re good to go.

The textures used in the hearts came from a book called Photoshop CS/CS2 Wow! Book It has more information about Photoshop than I can ever use, and it also comes with a DVD loaded with textures and more.

So that’s it. Those are the basic elements I used to make the “Classically Trained Cat” above, except for the basic photo of the cat and the text.

Now, just as an administrative note, I’m changing up the format here on the heArt-a-Day blog to include art tutorials, guest bloggers/artists, and links to heart centered websites, articles, etc., that I think are worthwhile.

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