Digital Doorways

Happy Thursday, faithful readers! I don't know about you, but I'm having lots of fun with this month's Random Doorways Digital kit! (But then, if you know about my obsession with love of doors, this doesn't surprise you!)

I was thinking about making some digital layouts with some of my door photos (yeah, I've got quite a few door layouts already, but most of those are paper layouts and they don't use this fantastic kit!), but I decided that I didn't want a 'typical' layout, I wanted something different, artsy even. Something that might be suitable for framing that could hang in my home somewhere.

So, I opened a new scrapbook page in Photoshop and started playing. Truthfully, my first few attempts were pretty bad - sometimes, it takes me a little while to get into a creative groove, especially when I'm experimenting with 'artsiness' as I go! But the cool thing about digital is that I never run out of supplies, so it really doesn't matter how many times I have to start! Really, this is one of my most favorite things about digital crafting!

Then, an idea popped into my head - 9 squares, like a patchwork - let's see if that would work…

I used the guidelines in Photoshop to draw horizontal and vertical lines at 4 and 8 inches. Then I opened all the Random Doorways backgrounds and added them, as 4 inch squares, to the layout, like a patchwork - I didn't use the 2 backgrounds that look like corrugated cardboard - I like them a whole lot, but they didn't really work so well with this layout, so I had to use one of the backgrounds twice (but I recolored it and rotated it the 2nd time so that it would be a bit different (another really cool benefit of digi!)

Here's what I ended up with as my 'starting' canvas:

A 9-Patch of backgrounds to start off.

Next up, I searched thorough some of my door photos and picked a few of my favorites, added them onto my layout and resized and cropped so that each one fit in a square. Here's the first one in position, so that you get the idea:

Now we add photos over each background.

Once they were all in place, I started applying layer styles to the photos - this requires a bit of experimenting, since some layer styles work better than others, depending on the patterns and colors in the parts that you're working on. But after a few minutes, I had something that I liked:

Now let's apply some layer styles; play until you're happy!

Last step, I wanted to add a title of sorts, but still keep that artsy, funky feel. I decided on the 2 different fonts for this kit, in white, on the 2 red squares - the white showed up best on them. I decided that I would rasterize the text layers (um, in non-geek-speak, that means to convert them from text to graphics so that I can do a few other things to them) and hit them with a couple of spatter brushes in eraser mode to distress the text just a wee bit.

And here's my finished layout:

Add a title and you're done!

What do you think? It's not your typical layout, and I know that it won't appeal to everyone, but it really is what I was going for, and I'm quite happy with it. In fact, my plan is to print this out and frame it!

Until next time, go and create something wonderful - and don't be afraid to experiment or try something new - you never know what you might come up with