Tag: texture

Graphic Design

Stand Tall printable

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?

Tips

Crop-tastic

Jessica Smith

I am by no means a fantastic photographer, so the photography advice I give on my blog is few and far between (and is usually advice I got from someone with actual photography experience). I’ve been playing around with the macro feature on my camera lately, which results in really up-close-and-personal shots of the subject — in my case, things in my garden!

The details in the photos are impressive, but the compositions aren’t always great. So I started playing around with cropping and I’m loving the results I’ve gotten.

You can crop a photo in pretty much any program… Paint, Word, Photoshop, etc. You can even crop photos on WordPress and Facebook!

When you crop a photo, you are  selecting an area of a photo you would like to keep and then removing all of the rest (Yes, I know that most people know what this is… but just in case!). I’ve found that for detail shots, cropping is my friend big time.

My photos go from this:

To this:

If you have a very detailed photo, cropping the photo in just the right manner can enhance the detail even more. I think it adds a lot of texture to my nature shots that would have otherwise been lost.

Wouldn’t these shots look great as a gallery of square, matted frames?

These tight shots could be taken on a really nice camera, but my point and shoot camera isn’t all that sophisticated. For now, cropping and the macro feature will do just fine!