Thursday 16 February 2012

Altered matchboxes and PSE tutorial

HI Everyone

I have been out today to see my sis and we had some time to finish a project we started back last November, but more about that another day.


It was fabulous to have Shirley (FSC), Irene, Claire and Amber come round for some crafty time together last night. 
Irene had been collecting matchboxes, so our challenge was to alter one in any way we wanted. 
We had great fun chatting whilst creating and making and the pics tell the story.

Left to right - Irene, Shirley, Amber and Claire.








You can see both the inside and outside of the boxes.

The girls did very shabby chic styles using gesso, paints, inks, fabrics as well as music paper.
Mine was more grungy and is meant to look like a suitcase - that's because I know exactly who this is for, but I can't share who that person is at the moment.

I think you'll agree everyone did a great job altering their matchbox, we had such great fun.


Yesterday I showed some photos with faded edges. I decided I wanted to learn how to do this and have found several ways of experimenting to get the sort of style I like. Sue asked if I would do a tutorial to show how I had done it. So here goes, I am using Photo Shop Elements 7.

1. Open the photograph you want to use; crop and edit.

2. Select the Eliptical Marquee Tool.

3. Click the image in the top left hand corner and drag to the bottom right hand corner to get the shape you want to work with.

4. Go to Select on the top menu bar and click 'Feather', then enter a radius amount. play with different numbers to see what effects you can achieve. Press ok.


5. Go to Select again and then click on 'Inverse' and ok.

6. Go to Edit and click 'Fill Layer' - here you can choose what you want for colour etc. I had my background set on white so I chose that.


7. Save your new photo with a different name so that you don't lose your original.


This one was feathered at 75 pixels


This was was feathered at 50 pixels.

I hope you find this useful Sue. As you can see I haven't used any brushes at all using this technique.

Have a good end of the week and thanks for stopping by today.

hugs {brenda} xox


Photobucket