May Flaum - Scrapbook Workshop: The Best Techniques from Your Favorite Scrapbook Bloggers

www.annaaspnes.typepad.com

Anna Aspnes is a digital scrapbooking artist, designer and instructor best known for her use of brushes and her artsy blended style. I enjoy visiting her blog to see what products shes been creating and how shes using them, and, in general, for digital inspiration. Her approach is artistic, and I always leave her blog feeling inspired and encouraged, never overwhelmed. I really like the glimpses into her creative process, seeing all that she does with digital products. I also appreciate the peeks at products shes releasing and classes she is teaching.

Anna is a British-born, U.S. Air Force wife living in Colorado with her husband and two children. She loves to push the realms of digital and create outside the box well into the night.

This layout celebrates a single chance shot of my husband and son during Christmas 2010. I made the photo large in spite of the technical imperfections because it portrays the tender side of a relationship between father and son. I create single photo layouts less often than I do a layout with multiple photos. So, I used the cast shadow technique to add interest to an otherwise flat and simple page.

Supplies: Adobe Photoshop; ArtPlay Palette Weihnachtsbaum-Anna Aspnes, Little Bit of Messy Love WordART-Ali Edwards (www.designerdigitals.com); font-Pea Kadee

The drop shadow is a layer style in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements that allows the scrapbooker to add a level of realism to any digital element in either a fully digital or hybrid project. The Drop Shadow Layer Style provides the illusion of depth to a physically flat page, mimicking the dimensional layering found in paper scrapbook pages. The default Drop Shadow Layer Style applies a uniform shadow to any element, but this shadow can be separated from the element and then warped to create a cast shadow, which provides an unevenand therefore more realisticappearance.

MATERIALS

Adobe Photoshop

ArtPlay Palette
Weihnachtsbaum-Anna Aspnes

(www.designerdigitals.com)

Little Bit of Messy Love WordART
Ali Edwards

(www.designerdigitals.com)

Font (Pea Kadee)

Create a digital layout with photos, papers, digital brushes and embellishments. I have grouped some of the layers in the Layers palette, excluding the embellishments.

Select one of your embellishment layers in the Layers palette and apply a Drop Shadow Layer Style to that layer. Click on Layer in the Options bar at the top of the screen and select Layer Style, followed by Drop Shadow, from the fly-out menus. Notice the fx symbol and the drop shadow effect attached to the embellishment layer in the Layers palette.

Mouse over the drop shadow label in the Layers palette and right click (or Control click) to activate a fly-out menu of options. Select Create Layer from the menu. A dialogue box will appear stating that Some aspects of the Effect cannot be reproduced with layers! Click OK.
The same result can also be achieved by duplicating the embellishment layer, converting the original layer to dark gray and then applying
a slight Gaussian Blur Filter to the layer. Notice that the drop shadow layer is now a separate layer beneath the embellishment layer and
that there are two layers.

Select the embellishments drop shadow layer in the Layers palette and apply the Warp tool. Click on Edit in the Options bar, select Transform and then Warp from the fly-out menus. Notice the grid that appears around the embellishment. Drag the handles of the grid outwards to warp the embellishments drop shadow layer. Double click on the grid to accept the transformation.