I wanted to make a royal blue and white digital scrapbooking paper, as those were my school colors, but I wanted it to have some texture. I could have just done some simple color changing, but that would have not made the paper quite as interesting. So I decided to use one of the ScrapSimple Photo Templates to help me along. In this case, I used ScrapSimple Photo Templates: Water-2101.

 

1. First I opened a new 12x12 document. I have a habit of working on a document with a transparent background. I have learned that I can always dump color in there, if I want to later.

 

2. Using the Move Tool, I slide the photo onto my new document. (Depending upon your particular scrapbooking software, you may have to copy and paste the items over as you work.)

 

3. Next, I add a new layer and dump royal blue in it. Notice that in my Layers Palette, I now have three layers. You can't can't see the photo yet, but you will after the next step!

 

4. Now I lower the opacity (transparency) of the royal blue layer until I like how it looks. I love the look of the splash because I know that it will make the digital scrapbooking paper interesting once I add the ScrapSimple Paper Template items in there.

 

5. Now I slide the first Paper Template on top of the document with the Move Tool. (Depending on how your software works, you may have to copy and paste it into your document instead.) I designed this particular set of ScrapSimple Paper Templates so that the templates can be layered in all kinds of ways and no matter how you layer them, they all work together. This will help you get many looks from one digital scrapbooking Paper Template set.

 

6. Next, I select the gray words with the Magic Wand, and once the "marching ants" are outlining them (make sure you don't have contiguous selected), I use the Paint Bucket to dump white in each letter.

 

7. Then I slide the next template on top of it.

 

8. I select the gray in the stars (which also selected the middle of the words) with the Magic Wand. Then I go to Image> Adjustments> Color Balance. The path to your particular software's color adjustment place will be different but you WILL have a place where you can adjust the reds, blues, and greens. I play with the slider until I like the color of blue that has replaced the gray tone. Make sure you work on the three different lighting settings (shadows, midtones, highlights).

 

It looks like this once it is finished. If you look closely, you will see I still have the "matching ants" on it.

 

9. Now I decide I don't want black outlines on my words, I want white ones. I happen to know a fast way to do that. I select the black with my Magic Wand and then go to my Brightness and Contrast setting and turn them both up to 100%. Easy, huh?

 

Ta-da! I have it. And see the cool texture behind everything?

 

10. Now to make this one a little different, I have added the cheerleaders on it. I changed the color using the dumping Paint Bucket (it's easiest way when the figures are large), then I reduced the opacity and changed the Blend Mode setting to "Darken." By the way, playing with your Blend Mode settings gives you all kinds of variants, so you should definitely experiment with that!

So now you can see that by playing with the ScrapSimple Paper Templates and the ScrapSimple Photo Templates, you not only can have a blast, you can create endless varieties of things. That is how I created all of those fun varieties of digital scrapbooking paper samples you can see on my marketing graphic with my new ScrapSimple Paper Templates. I used them in combination with the Photo Templates and played around until I found things I liked. It feels sort of like digital finger painting or something as you are doing it.

Have fun!

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	Note: Commercial license versions of ScrapSimple Paper Templates: Cheer, ScrapSimple Photo Templates: Water 2101, ScrapSimple Photo Templates: Rust 3801 Mini and ScrapSimple Embellishment Templates: Hip Chick Big Stitches are also available.

Tutorial by Ro