Happy Digital Scrapbooking Week! I’m Darcy Baldwin, from Sweet Shoppe Designs, bringing you this nifty trick to taking your digital journaling to the next level – a great technique on creating a ‘handwritten’ feel to your digital layouts! It’s my very first guest blog post and I’m so excited!
Here is a layout that I love of my son….the minutes are going by so quickly as he’s growing up. I wanted to make the feel of the journaling true to me, and used my own handwriting font. I also wanted to give it more of a realistic feel that I had written the journaling myself, with little indentations that would naturally happen if I wrote it with a pen.
While there is nothing wrong about the way it looks, I really wanted to add a tiny bit of extra ‘oomph’ to the journaling.
How to add an embossed layer effect to your journaling - an effect that makes it look like you’ve really written on the page! This technique works for Photoshop only.
1. Create your journaling area.
2. Double click on your journaling layer in your layers box
3. Click on Bevel and Emboss in the layer popup box
4. Change the settings on the box to refect the image shown here:
You can play with all of these numbers to get a look that works best for your layout – you may need to increase for darker backgrounds, decrease for finer fonts
5. Click okay
Moments by Darcy Baldwin. Supplies: Digital kit: Lauren Grier; Font: DJB Writes a lot.
While the contrast between styles may not be as evident on your computer screen, when you’ve printed off the layout you’ll see a big difference in how it looks. You’ve added depth and style to your layers of papers and elements with shadows and bevels, and now you can add a bit more depth to your journaling using this great embossing technique – and your pages will look like you’ve added the journaling after the fact!
Use coupon code ck-writesalot to get DJB Writes a Lot by Darcy Baldwin {fontography} for free – at Sweet Shoppe Designs (you must be registered and signed in to use the coupon). Expires November 30, 2011, 12 midnight, good for this font only.
Also, if you’d love to win your own custom handwriting font, leave a comment here on this blog post. Two winners will win their own custom print handwriting font!
Have a great week celebrating Digital Scrapbook Day!
–Darcy Baldwin
Congratulations to our winner, SammyD:
What a neat tip and cool font, thanks Darcy =)
Thanks for participating in this giveaway!
I already have one custom font, but been playing with the idea of getting another one one day, so here’s to chance. And thanks for the chance to win. Luv your fonts, but you know that.
Thanks for the font and for the chance to win!
thanks for the information about darcy and thanks for this opportunity to have my own font!
Thanks for the great tip and font and for the chance to win my own font!
What a great technique. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. I haven’t gotten my own handwriting font yet. It’s on my wishlist though. Thank you for this awesome chance to win it. Thanks again for the freebie.
Thanks so much for the gorgeous free font. I know that I will use it a lot. Also thanks for the opportunity to win my own handwriting font.
Thanks so much for the lovely font and contest entry! It’s just what I needed!
Thank you for the tip and the free font. Pick me, pick me to win!!! I so would love the handwriting font.
I’m new to scrapbooking. I had no idea that you could actually get a font that matches your handwriting! Woo Hoo! : D
Wow, I had no idea I could have my own handwriting as a font! Thank you for your generosity.
Thanks for the great tip Darcy! I love learning new things in Photoshop. Thanks for the great new font, too.
What a great idea! Thank you!
I have always wanted my own handwritting to be made into a font, how awesome would that be, inspiring post Darcy I do use these tools in my journaling on my layouts and for the titles too but never really taken much notice that I could customise them, I usually use the filters like soft edges and emboss or simple emboss in PSE7, so thank you for showing me how to do it with style!