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Journaling with the Pen Tool

Lesson 29 from: Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Traci Reed

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Lesson Info

29. Journaling with the Pen Tool

Lesson Info

Journaling with the Pen Tool

Now what happens if you have a funky shape that you want a journal inside use the pen tal very right ok, so let's talk about the pen tool we're going to draw a path and now what I want is I want all of my journaling to fill up all of this space and I want to make it so that it's angle diagonally down this way ok? So let's it's a two part process first we have tio draw the shape so I'm gonna start down here where it's easy and I'm just going to draw the corner of the shape and I hold down shift to make sure that the line say straight right there oh and what did I do wrong? I have it on shape instead of fill our statements that a path so we're going back half we're gonna click again okay? And now it doesn't have to be perfect it's not like extracting you just kind of wanted to loop around the edges of your cluster and now if you go all the way in here it's kind of add a kind of a funky little overhang so I like to say just along the main cluster and say ok, if it goes over the paint we'r...

e gonna go back around here and you're having anchors every so often just adding anchors it's really loosely based because we're not we don't have to be precise when we start typing the text isn't going to align perfectly to the outside edges anyway, so it doesn't have to be like this. Perfect. You want to go directly up to the air up to this edge of the embellishments? In fact, you wanted to be a little bit offset because if you went right up to the edge of the embellishments, in some places it will touch. So you want to have a little bit of a gap between your path and your embellishments so curving a little bit, you're actually for the curves. You really not going to see any of it? It's? Just easier for me to draw a curved path around these embellishments, and it is to add more anchor points. Now the path is covering that string up, and it could be a problem later on down the line. I don't want to deal with something he's, a direct selection tool, and I'm just going to move this anchor or just this anchor point down, okay, so now I have a path and the problem with this path is if I just click in here, I was wondering what was wrong so the problem I had and you can fix it very easily the problem I had is that I still had my my pencil said on subtract so instead of drawing the path inside where I just drew a drew it on the outside you fix that really easily all you have to do is command click it and then select the inverse which is control come in shift I or control shift I and then draw a new path and this is the draw a new path from the selection tool right here but it's now the path is in the right place instead of backwards so ok back to what I was talking about if um I start writing directly in this path it's going tio auto fill into the path which is fine how I said I wanted it to be diagonal and this is not diagonal so in order to make it diagonal what we have to dio is we have to orient the path with the past election tool I'm gonna hit command t to rotate the path we have to orient the path so that the direction that we want the text to go is at the top so we want the text to go down this way right so I'm going to put the very tiptop up here and then I'm just gonna add my journaling in just like it is right here fill up the box and then when it's done I rotated back so now is diagonal wait so adding an individual lines of journaling yeah going that way yeah so that is that was ah ha moment for me too, and I figured it out so you can also use the custom path or the pencil to create a custom path for your journaling so let's elite this one and we're just going toe for an example, let's say instead of filling up the space, I want tio make my journaling go around the space, so I'm just drawing a really loose path again remember that you can hold down when you click and you hold down the mouse instead of letting go, you can curve the path so I'm not letting go and I concur of the path and then with the direct selection tool and come in at any time and decide that that was too close and I want to move it around a little bit so now because I didn't close this path it's actually of half instead of a shape and I can add my journaling to the path just like I did on the outside edge of the shape that we drew earlier and I could make it curve any direction I want now let's say that this is ok, I have overlap here that's going to be a problem, so now I can still come in here with the direct selection tool and zoom in and I can't edit this path with the journaling on it still as long as you have your journaling layer selected, it will edit the path that the journaling is on, so it doesn't have to be an afterthought. You're journaling doesn't have to be something that you're like. Oh, I needed to write something, let's, just add it in at the last moment, even if you've designed to page, I really want you to focus on, ok, I have this journaling. Now, where can I add it that it's going to design that's, going to add to the aesthetic of the page, rather than just be an afterthought? So I want I want you to use custom pads, and I want you to use alignment, tools and all of the things that we've been talking about, to really take it to the next level.

Class Materials

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Shadow Styles
Stitching Brushes
Stitching Styles

Ratings and Reviews

Corrina
 

I have recently discovered digital scrapbooking and have been using a great scrapbooking software that I downloaded on-line. There are limitations with the software that prompted me to look deeper for ideas. Traci's course was fantastic! I learned so much from her not only in scrapbooking layouts and using different elements in a page but my level of understanding of photoshop has improved dramatically. The presentation was easy to follow and broken into perfect chunks to go back and review the techniques. Thank you so much Traci for presenting this awesome course. I will look for more of your courses. Your scrapbooking is beautiful and inspiring!

ChristyWhitehead
 

I'm a photographer. I do a lot of graphic design for my business. I feel like I'm fairly knowledgeable. I saw this class being shown for free on Creative Live one day and it wasn't my first choice to watch, but was the best out of the list... I was wrong. This is a great class. I didn't expect to learn that much and I've been learning a lot! Great info!

LourdesM
 

This course was amazing. I learn some things I didn't know how to do. Traci is simple and straight forward in her teaching. Very easy to understand.

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