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Above: In my defence, this beach in Spain was full of people posing for the ‘gram, so please understand this was very much tongue in cheek to make my friend laugh ;-). Created with the latest Hear My Voice collection (HMV Renewing)
One of the challenges of creating with photos is working out how to avoid them being lost - or look out of place - against the colourful, interesting or busy details of a mixed media creation.
And often I want my photo to seamlessly blend in with all the ‘paper’ and assets I am using.
I always tweak my photos to achieve these aims. Whether just upping the brightness and contrast, or the saturation - or adding a color overlay to make it ‘pop’ more. If I am wanting a real ‘blending in’ effect I will use a clipping mask (a shape for ‘clipping’ the photo to). Then I will play around with blend modes to ‘blend’ it into the background and get a look I like - in the beach page at the top, that was darken mode.
Often I will duplicate the photo layer and combine different blend modes, as in the snow page below.
On that page I also recolored using color overlays - both blue and brown.
And in the Berlin page that I created with my brand new “Memory Capture” templates, I combined four photos into the main photo block, using different blend modes and erasing parts of them.
It may sound complex but the joy of creating digitally is that you can just play around until you get an effect you like, and you can always go back a step or two if you don’t like it! Once you have clipped a photo to a mask, play around with the different blend modes in your programme. If you like the effect but it has made your photo ‘disappear’ too much, perhaps duplicate the photo, put the top layer on ‘normal’ mode and reduce the opacity and/or use a soft brush to partially erase it.
There are some more tips and tricks to get you started in this video on my YouTube channel
What I used …
On the “Little Miss Sunshine in the snow’ page, I used my new “Textual Layered Transfers No.6” along with the new “A Winter’s Tale” collection. These are great if you want to make an arty page in a snap - and also be able to personalise the paint to match any layout/photos.
You get two differently coloured ‘drag and drop’ versions of each of the four ‘paint transfers’, but you also get the layered PSD versions so you can personalise, recolour and reuse for endless variations:
“A Winter’s Tale” is a collaboration with Anita Designs, also new in store:
A new edition of Hear My Voice
Always an exciting time of the month, when Rachel Jefferies of Pixels and Paint and I release our latest creations in this series
It was so much fun to create with!
I also have some new CU brushes/png stamps and pattern templates at The Lilypad:
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