Kits Aren't Only for Digital Scrapbooking

Even if you're not into digital scrapbooking, the digital scrapbooking kits on this site can be great inspiration for other projects. For instance, my sister recently asked me for some backgrounds to use in an article on the Christianity About.com site. I used the torn paper from the Paesaggio scrapbooking kit as a starting point, then embellished it with my new Floral Flourish brushes. Check them out in her article 10 Encouraging Words for the Discouraged. There are two different backgrounds which alternate on each page. Here's more information on how they were done.

I started by cropping the bottom edge from the torn paper image. Next I used the lasso tool to make a rough selection around the edge. I inverted the selection and pressed delete to give the paper an uneven edge.

I selected the burn tool and used a variety of brushes to go around the edge of the torn paper to give it a aged and burned appearance.

On a new layer, I stamped a few strokes from the flourish brushes. I didn't use the entire brush tip to create the flourishes in the document; most of the brush stroke landed outside of the document window. On the asymmetrical background, I erased part of the brush stroke because I felt it was unbalanced. On the symmetrical one, I only created the brush strokes on one side, then duplicated them, flipped them, and moved them to the other side so they would be a mirror image.

Once I had the brush strokes positioned, I created a clipping group with the paper layer to keep the brush strokes confined to the paper layer. For more on clipping groups, see my new Photoshop tutorial on cutting a picture into a shape.

Finally, I added some layer effects to the brush strokes--Color Overlay in a lighter brown with the Linear Burn blend mode, then Inner Glow with some noise also using the Linear Burn blend mode. Then the entire brush stroke layer was set to the Color Burn blend mode with 70% opacity. I arrived at these settings just by experimenting and they might be slightly different between the two backgrounds.

I finished it off with the trim command and save for web, and my sister added the text to the backgrounds.

I hope this gives you some ideas for different ways you can use the digital scrapbooking elements on this site! I've also used the frames, papers, and other elements from the scrapbooking kits to create other backgrounds for my sister, but you'll have to wait to see those!