Digital Beads

Hi Everyone! Ron from Club Scrap here with another Thursday installment of digital inspiration!

I gotta tell ya, I was having a hard time coming up with a topic for this week's blog post. So in an effort to find an idea, I started searching though some of my digital layouts, hoping something would inspire me. And a couple of things happened…

First, I discovered that over the years, I've used beads quite a bit in my digital layouts. I don't tend to use real beads a lot - probably 'cuz my fingers are often too big to deal with the needle and thread and those tiny beads! But this was a cool week to discover my affinity for digital beads, because we're having a Bead Blowout over at GHM! So I thought I'd follow this bead theme and share a few of those layouts with you:

And then I came across this layout that I made as part of a challenge to use something unusual to create a photo frame:

And then it hit me - how about a frame made of beads? So I grabbed some beads from several digital kits and got to work. To help keep things lined up, I opened a photo and dragged it onto a new layout in Photoshop. Then I started dragging beads over and arranging them around the photo. Sometimes I resized the beads, or rotated them and recolored them.

Once half the frame was done (across the top and down the left side), I selected all the beads and duplicated them, then rotated them as a group to create the other half of the frame. Then, so the bottom and right sides wouldn't look like an exact copy of the top and left, I moved a few of the beads around and recolored a few more. Finally, I added a drop shadow to every bead - wait, it's not as bad as it sounds - I applied a drop shadow to 1 bead and then copied the layer style and pasted it to the rest of the layers all at the same time! I think it came out pretty cool - what do you think?

Okay, you're probably saying that I'm a little (or a lot) crazy to actually do something like that, but it really didn't take all that long - maybe 30 minutes and I saved it as a PSD file, so I can use it more than once if I want. But I hope it inspired you to try something different in your digital quest. What else can you think of to do with those buttons and beads that show up in those amazing Club Scrap Digital™ kits?

That's all for this week - now go create something wonderful with digital beads!