Creating New Looks With Your Digi Papers

One thing I have noticed our team members often do on their layouts is changing patterned papers to create a new look to go on their layouts.  I have really enjoyed getting ideas and inspiration from them and thought it would be fun to share a few with you.

In this layout, Jenn says, “In this layout I wanted to use the patterned paper for my background, but didn’t want the pattern to interfere with my journaling (or the grid to show through on photo blend), so I placed it over one of the more solid papers in the kit I was using, and just used a large soft round brush to lightly erase those areas where I didn’t want the pattern to show through.”

On the above layout Jenn used: House Blends Vol. 4 by Jenn Lindsey, Blog Your Life collab from the A5D Designers, Traveling Typewriter font.

Jenn says, “This one I combined 3 different papers for the background paper (a solid bluish paper, lined notebook, and lightly patterned monochromatic gray), erasing the majority of the notebook paper and applying a Hard Light blend mode (50% opacity), and overlay blend mode to the patterned paper. Since I wanted to highlight the journaling area, I then merged the 3 papers together, used my rectangular marquee tool to select the journaling space and changed the color with the Hue/Saturation slider.”

Jenn used: photo mask by Chaos Lounge, Romantic Fantasy Collab by Digital Crea, EnjoyEachDay by Designs by Dyouge, Summer Memories by Holly Designs, Font: Pea Bandit

Here’s what Jacki says about this layout, “ I love Jacque’s doodled papers! When I was done with the LO I thought the edges looked a bit unfinished to me so I used the eraser and followed Jacque’s doodled outside line. I placed a colored paper behind it and it was just enough to frame the page and give it an extra pop! Then I used the eyedropper tool and picked colors from Jacque’s doodled paper to fill in certain parts of the wordart. For the large photo I used the pull down menu in the Layers Palette and chose the option Hard Light. I blended it with Jacque’s paper by using the soft edge eraser.”

In this layout Jacki used: Jacque Larsen’s Doodle Days paper pack, Warm Hearts, and CD Muckosky wordart from Take Flight.

Here’s what Jacki said about this layout: “I blended 2 background papers. I wanted the blue floral paper as the main background page and extracted the cityscape from another page and overlayed it on the floral paper and merged the two together. I used the Clone tool to “erase” some of the flowers on the blue background so they wouldn’t interfere with my journaling.”

Jacki used:  Julia Makotinsky’s Travel the World-India kit and a template from Yin Designs.

Jacki said, “For the background paper I blended 2 of Shabby Princess’s floral papers. I used a large soft edge eraser to gently erase parts of the top paper to reveal the more detailed floral of the one below.”

In this layout, Jacki used: Shabby Princess’s “Barefoot” kit, leaves from Kate Hadfield’s collab “Backyard Bliss” and a flower from Shabby Miss Jenn’s “Fresh Summer.

I thought it would be fun to show you some before and after of a few papers:

These are papers from Penny’s contribution to The Digi Files this month.

When I put the gray paper layer above the dotted paper and applied the lighten blend mode:

Here’s another of Penny’s papers:

Here’s one of the Weeds and Wildflowers papers from this month’s digi files:

Here’s what they look like when I put the W&W paper layer on top and applied the lighten blending mode:

This is what happened when I applied the color burn blending mode:

When you have two papers and your blending modes, your options are limitless!  Go ahead!  Give it a try!