Thinking I’m going to skip the wavy border for now and come back to it when I have a chance to make some ellies. So saving my spot for this, as it’s up next.
While I’m working on that, I have a potentially silly question— how do you actually use the alpha sheets in scrapping? I do like to sometimes use alphas for larger titles, but I’ve only ever really used the individual letter file ones because extracting them from sheets seems cumbersome. Do I just magic lasso them out or something? (I have PSE.)
In PSE, if I'm using an alpha sheet I hope that the designer was nice enough to leave room to easily select with the rectangular selection tool. Then cntrl-J and it's on a new layer. I think that an alpha sheet is actually faster than pulling in the individual files.
Here's the two I made. I used the Gill Sans for the first -- PSE had the option for "Load Selection" greyed out and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I used a stroke on a second layer to get the same look.
And this was using one called Juice ITC, along with a small stroke and Robyn's glitter texture.
Becky: Yeah, what Tricia said: The rectangle selection tool or the lasso works perfectly if there's spacing. When I did mine for this challenge, I purposely hit the space button to make sure there was enough of a "dead zone" to easily select each letter. Love the texture on the first alpha. And I always love glitter, and that's on a cute font.
Everyone: I'm SO mad at myself right now. I was QC'ing the other day and realized I hadn't put the flower on the second sheet of alphas (lower case and punctuation). And, unfortunately, I guess I deleted the flower and cleared out my recycle bin! UGH! Massive oversight on my part, so I sent the entire alpha set into the bin. I might redo it, but I doubt it. It was a lot of work to place the flower on each individual letter.
What Tricia said, but if clearance is tight, I use the polygonal lasso tool. It is usually just four or five points that I need to put down to establish a perimeter. Almost as quick as using the rectangular marquee tool. I guess I am not sure Elements has that lasso, so if not, ignore my interruption.
Link from Scraptorial that explains it, too. I am thinking I will include a link to this in all my scrap kits that contain an all-in-one alpha from now on 'cause I don't think you are the only person wondering, Becky.
Neat alphas, Becky. Fun texture on the first one and you can never go wrong with glitter! Love the "Juice" font. Really cute alpha for scrapping!
"I used the Gill Sans for the first -- PSE had the option for "Load Selection" greyed out and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I used a stroke on a second layer to get the same look."
You were trying to make a separate border from the Scraptorial instructions? The plain Gill Sans file (with only one layer) might open up and be named "background layer" by PSE. You can't do certain things to background layers so you need to rename it to something else (like Layer 0) to transform it into a normal layer that you can add a style to or make a selection of it. Not sure if that was the issue or not. I am just guessing.
There was a second version of the alpha cheat sheet that had a pre-made border already included on a second layer . . . unless I forgot to put that in the zip. Anything is possible at this point, but I think it was in there. No matter, the stroked border looks great!
Christina, I feel your pain. I once accidentally flailed and deleted a whole scrap kit and emptied my recycle bin before realizing what I had done. Spent days trying to find something that would recover it to no avail. So frustrating!
Just a thought, you could extract the little flower from one of the decorated letters and include it as a separate PNG so the scrapper could decorate the letters themselves after placing their title or word art on a page. I have done something like that a couple times. Include several plain alphas, and a few different "tiny trinkets" in PNG format that are meant to be decorations to place on the letters as desired, or not. It is less work for the designer AND it adds options for the end-user, or that was my thought process anyway.
Kimberly, your shiny, glittery 3D alpha is so AWESOME! So bright and fun and FESTIVE. Can't wait to see what else you come up with if you make additional alphas. Really pretty alpha set.
I commented in the Commons when I first saw this alpha posted, Sarah, but it bears repeating that I love it. So colorful and fun and wonderfully fits your "Boardgame" theme. I knew your palette colors were gonna look really cool together, and this alpha shows that off to perfection. Good job!
Annette: OMGoodness, losing an entire kit! Frustrating isn't even the word! I was considering extracting the flower, but my mind voted against it. lol I still have three alpha sets, so that's plenty of options. I normally don't include even one alpha. However, I'll probably make one for the December blog train.
I took a nine year break from designing when I lost that entire kit. And of course when it is gone and you can't claw it back no matter how hard you try, it seems like it was the coolest, most fantastic kit EVER! It was a really tough pill to swallow and I wanted so badly to blame it on someone else, but it was ME. ALL ME! I did it to myself. *sigh* Still might not be completely over it.
No worries. I just was trying to help if I could. Three alphas is two more than I made this time! I do like making them, but they are fussy and time-consuming, too.
Wow, really?! Nine years??? Breaks happen, though. Life gets in the way.
I actually deleted a Thanksgiving kit I started making yesterday. I was planning to upload it to the commons. But, at the end of the day, I deleted it because I simply didn't care for it. The papers weren't coming out right. It just didn't look good at all. I made the right choice! lol
I need to rework my previews for Spring Bling, so I can get the entire kit posted.
Exactly my thoughts, Tricia: Never again! It was a lot of work to place them, rotate them, add a drop shadow, and then delete said drop shadow around the letter. Yes, it sucks I lost it, but such is life. Not everything always goes as planned.
The problem with the lights was NOT deleting the glow or the places that the lights crossed open space in the letter. When I was a designer, they taught us a trick for deleting those extra shadows. Place everything, but keep your separate layers. When you are done, duplicate all your layers, remove all styles, merge the duplicated un-styled layers...and then send them to the back/bottom & hide them. Merge all visible...then clip the shadowed layer to the un-shadowed layer after making it visable again. (Unfortunately this did NOT work for the lights!!)
I didn't do them in Photoshop. I switch back and forth between PS and Paintshop Pro. Using the text tool in PSP is easier for me. I don't really use it in PS. But, yeah, I could've merged all the shadow layers and remove them in one fell swoop. But, you know how it goes...you get in the zone and forget things that make designing simpler. lol
BTW, are you done uploading your kits to the commons or are there more coming? I downloaded the bundle earlier. Just curious if that was all of it.
The bundle is all of the desert kit. Tonight the Ho Ho Holy will upload. The bundle has everything of that.... except maybe the yo-yo I made a couple days ago with the gradient tutorial. I don't think I put that in any kit. I'll have to look tonight.
Here's one of mine. Going to make another or two. lol
Kimberly, these are fantastic!
Thinking I’m going to skip the wavy border for now and come back to it when I have a chance to make some ellies. So saving my spot for this, as it’s up next.
While I’m working on that, I have a potentially silly question— how do you actually use the alpha sheets in scrapping? I do like to sometimes use alphas for larger titles, but I’ve only ever really used the individual letter file ones because extracting them from sheets seems cumbersome. Do I just magic lasso them out or something? (I have PSE.)
In PSE, if I'm using an alpha sheet I hope that the designer was nice enough to leave room to easily select with the rectangular selection tool. Then cntrl-J and it's on a new layer. I think that an alpha sheet is actually faster than pulling in the individual files.
Thanks, Tricia!
Here's the two I made. I used the Gill Sans for the first -- PSE had the option for "Load Selection" greyed out and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I used a stroke on a second layer to get the same look.
And this was using one called Juice ITC, along with a small stroke and Robyn's glitter texture.
Becky: Yeah, what Tricia said: The rectangle selection tool or the lasso works perfectly if there's spacing. When I did mine for this challenge, I purposely hit the space button to make sure there was enough of a "dead zone" to easily select each letter. Love the texture on the first alpha. And I always love glitter, and that's on a cute font.
Everyone: I'm SO mad at myself right now. I was QC'ing the other day and realized I hadn't put the flower on the second sheet of alphas (lower case and punctuation). And, unfortunately, I guess I deleted the flower and cleared out my recycle bin! UGH! Massive oversight on my part, so I sent the entire alpha set into the bin. I might redo it, but I doubt it. It was a lot of work to place the flower on each individual letter.
What Tricia said, but if clearance is tight, I use the polygonal lasso tool. It is usually just four or five points that I need to put down to establish a perimeter. Almost as quick as using the rectangular marquee tool. I guess I am not sure Elements has that lasso, so if not, ignore my interruption.
Link from Scraptorial that explains it, too. I am thinking I will include a link to this in all my scrap kits that contain an all-in-one alpha from now on 'cause I don't think you are the only person wondering, Becky.
Neat alphas, Becky. Fun texture on the first one and you can never go wrong with glitter!
Love the "Juice" font. Really cute alpha for scrapping!
"I used the Gill Sans for the first -- PSE had the option for "Load Selection" greyed out and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I used a stroke on a second layer to get the same look."
You were trying to make a separate border from the Scraptorial instructions? The plain Gill Sans file (with only one layer) might open up and be named "background layer" by PSE. You can't do certain things to background layers so you need to rename it to something else (like Layer 0) to transform it into a normal layer that you can add a style to or make a selection of it. Not sure if that was the issue or not. I am just guessing.
There was a second version of the alpha cheat sheet that had a pre-made border already included on a second layer . . . unless I forgot to put that in the zip.
Anything is possible at this point, but I think it was in there. No matter, the stroked border looks great! 
Christina, I feel your pain. I once accidentally flailed and deleted a whole scrap kit and emptied my recycle bin before realizing what I had done. Spent days trying to find something that would recover it to no avail. So frustrating!
Just a thought, you could extract the little flower from one of the decorated letters and include it as a separate PNG so the scrapper could decorate the letters themselves after placing their title or word art on a page. I have done something like that a couple times. Include several plain alphas, and a few different "tiny trinkets" in PNG format that are meant to be decorations to place on the letters as desired, or not. It is less work for the designer AND it adds options for the end-user, or that was my thought process anyway.
Kimberly, your shiny, glittery 3D alpha is so AWESOME! So bright and fun and FESTIVE. Can't wait to see what else you come up with if you make additional alphas. Really pretty alpha set.
Pretty green alpha, Robyn. I love anything done in a watercolor style and green is my favorite color. Very festive!
I commented in the Commons when I first saw this alpha posted, Sarah, but it bears repeating that I love it. So colorful and fun and wonderfully fits your "Boardgame" theme. I knew your palette colors were gonna look really cool together, and this alpha shows that off to perfection. Good job!
Annette: OMGoodness, losing an entire kit! Frustrating isn't even the word! I was considering extracting the flower, but my mind voted against it. lol I still have three alpha sets, so that's plenty of options. I normally don't include even one alpha. However, I'll probably make one for the December blog train.
I took a
It was a really tough pill to swallow and I wanted so badly to blame it on someone else, but it was ME. ALL ME! I did it to myself. *sigh* Still might not be completely over it.
nine yearbreak from designing when I lost that entire kit. And of course when it is gone and you can't claw it back no matter how hard you try, it seems like it was the coolest, most fantastic kit EVER!No worries. I just was trying to help if I could. Three alphas is two more than I made this time! I do like making them, but they are fussy and time-consuming, too.
Thanks for the tips, Annette!
Yikes! Yes, I placed all the lights on the cactus alpha one strip at a time...never again!! I am so sorry you lost your work.
Wow, really?! Nine years??? Breaks happen, though. Life gets in the way.
I actually deleted a Thanksgiving kit I started making yesterday. I was planning to upload it to the commons. But, at the end of the day, I deleted it because I simply didn't care for it. The papers weren't coming out right. It just didn't look good at all. I made the right choice! lol
I need to rework my previews for Spring Bling, so I can get the entire kit posted.
Exactly my thoughts, Tricia: Never again! It was a lot of work to place them, rotate them, add a drop shadow, and then delete said drop shadow around the letter. Yes, it sucks I lost it, but such is life. Not everything always goes as planned.
The problem with the lights was NOT deleting the glow or the places that the lights crossed open space in the letter. When I was a designer, they taught us a trick for deleting those extra shadows. Place everything, but keep your separate layers. When you are done, duplicate all your layers, remove all styles, merge the duplicated un-styled layers...and then send them to the back/bottom & hide them. Merge all visible...then clip the shadowed layer to the un-shadowed layer after making it visable again. (Unfortunately this did NOT work for the lights!!)
I didn't do them in Photoshop. I switch back and forth between PS and Paintshop Pro. Using the text tool in PSP is easier for me. I don't really use it in PS. But, yeah, I could've merged all the shadow layers and remove them in one fell swoop. But, you know how it goes...you get in the zone and forget things that make designing simpler. lol
BTW, are you done uploading your kits to the commons or are there more coming? I downloaded the bundle earlier. Just curious if that was all of it.
👍
The bundle is all of the desert kit. Tonight the Ho Ho Holy will upload. The bundle has everything of that.... except maybe the yo-yo I made a couple days ago with the gradient tutorial. I don't think I put that in any kit. I'll have to look tonight.
Gotcha! I'm about to check out the commons anyway.
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