Anyway, today I thought I'd show you a little of the cookbook I'm making for Katie's birthday. At Christmas, she asked me to put together recipes for some of her favorite foods. Surely by now you know better than to think I made a bunch of xeroxes and let it go at that. You do, don't you?
Over the last few weeks, whenever I've had a few minutes, I've typed recipes into Word documents. I've also scanned a bunch of photos and saved the files.
On Saturday evening, I bought Photoshop Elements. Now that I've owned Photoshop for almost three whole days, I'm on a roll. I blame Ree at The Pioneer Woman. She got me all hyped up about Photoshop and made me believe I could figure it out. She also introduced me to the idea of photoshop patterns and brushes. As soon as I got Elements loaded, I searched some out. Yeah, Baby. I loves me some patterns. And the brushes? Crazy. It's absolutely crazy how many gorgeous brushes you can get free on the internet.
Forgive me. My mind wandered for a moment. Back to the project in progress.
For each page, I open a document and create a layer for the pattern. (So far, I've used a different pattern on each page.)
Then I create another layer and draw a box. I fill the box with white and set the opacity at a level that lets me see some of the pattern in the layer below. I mess with different percentages until I find a setting I like. Even though I want to see the pattern, I also want to be able to read the text easily. This box is at 50% opacity. I use a brush to fill a selection around the box to make the darker border around the box.
Next, I create another layer and make a text box. From there, it's a simple matter to copy and paste the text from the Word documents into the photoshop file.
After adding another layer, I cut out a figure from one of the scanned photos and add it to the page.
Can we talk about that photo for a moment? Halloween, 1992. The thing she's wearing on her head is a skirt from her dress-up box. She called it "my beautiful long black hair," and she wore it on her head like that nearly every day. She made it into pony tails and pig tails. Buns, even. Her own hair was fine and thin and curly. And short. It took forever to grow. But not long after I made that skirt, she figured out that the stretchy sequins waistband functioned as a headband, too. From that moment on, she almost never wore it as a skirt, only as hair. She wore it so much that it seemed normal. One day when we were shopping, I noticed people smiling and laughing and pointing. It took half an hour to realize it was because she had that skirt on her head.
(Sigh)
About the project: There are probably many, many better ways to go about making these pages, but from the vantage point of 72 hours whole hours of experience, this is what I can manage. If you've got suggestions, I'd sure love to hear them. If anyone is interested, I'll show post more pages as I get them done.
4 comments:
Oh NO! That beautiful long black "hair" picture is Killing me! Hysterical, I wonder where she gets that creative imagination and spirit from. Glad you remembered to get a photo.
Rock on, crafty queen! Yes, I want to see more, of course! Are you dreaming this when you finally get to sleep?
So wonderful. Makes me think I should track down my mother's old recipe book and try to preserve it. That's a great business idea...transfer all the old family recipes to the computer with spiffy Photoshop additions.
Jerri Rockin with the Photoshop now!
Go girl. Love the step by step.
As yummy as that dilly bread looks, I can't think of anything more delicious than that beautiful long black hair. I adore everything about it!
What an amazing gift you are making for her, that will last a lifetime. Now I need to learn Photoshop so I can do this for my daughter some day!
Oh, and I guess I also need to learn how to cook.
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