freebie – A Smith of All Trades

Give Thanks printable

November 14, 2012 Jessica Smith

Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving. Holy moly, it is early this year. Thanksgiving is always crazy for us because we travel to Ohio to see my dad’s family. That doesn’t sound too crazy, but when you consider that we go up on Wednesday night and come back Saturday morning and that it is a 9-hour drive… well, you see what I’m talking about. But family is family, so we suck it up and go. And we have a great time 🙂

Today’s post is another graphic design tutorial using screen caps in InDesign. Let’s do this!

I wanted to make a “Give Thanks” printable/computer background for the month of November, so I opened up a new InDesign doc and got to work.

Since Fall has such rich, warm tones, I chose an orange for the background by dragging a box to the edges of the paper and filling it.

I adjusted my orange using the CMYK sliders.

In a second layer, I made this cross-looking design using the font Soft Ornaments Six. This shape is four “letters” rotated and joined together.

I liked this look, so I grouped the four “letters” together, then copied and pasted them into another layer. I rotated them so the cross became a snowflake-y design.

Then I added my words. I put them into one text box at first before I started to manipulate the text.

I found a font I like called Albemarle Swash, so I changed my text to that font and started playing with colors. First purple.

Nope. Then light blue with a brown background…

And then I changed “give” to be smaller and all lowercase, resting it on the upper curl of the “k.”

… and then I got tired of looking at orange. Shocker. I can’t stay away from blue, no matter how hard I try. I also made the document a square instead of a rectangle and changed my text to black.

I like how it turned out, even though the colors have nothing to do with the fall. In the blue, the background looks more like a snowflake, which means I can use this as my background all through the winter.

Feel free to download this printable, and remember to give thanks!

Things I am thankful for:

My husband
My family
My friends
My pup
My job and my awesome coworkers
My new and awesome neighbors
My house. Gosh, I love my house.
My blog and all of my followers!
…. and so many other things.

Graphic Design

Stand Tall printable

November 2, 2012November 2, 2012 Jessica Smith

I love to play around with the Adobe Creative Suite because every time I do I learn something new. For this printable, I was inspired by a tattoo I saw on Pinterest. Here are screenshots of the project as I went along.

I like to start any project with words or a quote by simply adding my text to the page and fooling around with different fonts until I find one that is just right. You’ll probably notice two different fonts between these first few images and my final image — I exed out of my original design and lost everything I had done so far so I had to start for square one again. Whoops.

After the text is on the page, I start manipulating it, sometimes adding different parts of the words into different text boxes altogether. For example, the “s” in “stand” is in its own text box, while “tand” is in another. This allows you to maneuver your text exactly how you want it. Since I wanted the “S” lower and in a larger font, it was easier to create a new text box for it than to leave it with the rest of the word. In that same vein, each letter in “tall” has its own text box.

After I squeezed, stretched, angled, shrunk, etc. my letters, I started adding the rest of the picture. I used the pencil tool and the smoothing tool to add these lines.

Notice the switched fonts? It worked out for the best I think.

With the InDesign portion of my printable done, I grabbed the vector image I created and dropped it into Photoshop.

On many different layers, I tinted the background, added the paintbrush texture, added giraffe spots and added the grass border. I had to play around with the opacity of each layer, but once I messed around with it enough I think I got it just right.

What do you think of the final product?