Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Hi!  Sara (livelys) here today with a little hybridy idea to share.

I regularly use digital stamps in the cards I make, and there is an increasing number of them in the SSD store.  These stamps are great to use as the SSD designers have effectively made them into brushes – so when you add them to your card they have no background built in & so are ready for you to colour & customise to your hearts content.

Jen Tapler wrote a lovely tutorial blog post (here) describing how she uses her Copic pens to colour in stamps.  I often use chalks for a hint of colour, though more frequently, I use digital papers – layering them behind the image & then ‘cutting’ them out using the polygonal lasso tool in Photoshop.

I’ve mentioned the ease of use of the digital stamps in the store – but I do have a collection of digi-stamps from other sources, lots of which unfortunately incorporate an annoyingly fixed white background.  This again is easy (though a little fiddly) to overcome, using that very useful lasso tool again – effectively extracting the image.

I have just finished this card for July’s portfolio challenge #8.  The challenge was to ‘Visit curlygirl’s shop and use the inspiration you find to create a page‘, and here’s my hybrid take on it, created using Dani Mogstad’s lovely Gnome Sweet Gnome:

I wanted to include as many of the essentials from Curly Girls designs as I could: a figure, layers of paper pieced patterned paper, a slightly vintage look, plus a fun saying.  I confess that I went with a play on the ‘Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag’ song title simply so I could use a cute bag digi-stamp!

I found just the right pair of legs (!) and bag in my own digi-stamp stash – unfortunately complete with built-in white background.  I cut around/ extracted the legs with the lasso tool & then used the paint bucket tool to give instant, coordinating colour.  With the bag stamp, I used the lasso to cut around the outside, zooming right in to do it neatly, and then I also used it to ‘cut out’ the white inside too, to effectively create a brush (of sorts!).

Fiddly as I said, but with an audio book on in the background it wasn’t too arduous! Really, really.

The last Photoshop stages included adding the lovely papers from Dani’s kit & my sentiments – the main one in Darcy’s DJB I’m No Wizard font.