Creating Chipboard Elements with Brushes

So you bought a kit – love all the doodles and swirls, the papers are perfect for the image you just shot, and last but not least the creative juices are flowing! Great – Wrong! The great swirl is in a stripe that looks horrific next to your daughter beautiful new…

Okay, maybe I am getting to personal, but I love having the ability to take a brush of a swirl and turn them into exactly what I want in the blink of an eye – well – a few click of a mouse :D

Today, we are going to take a brush from Rhonna Farrer and apply some papers and then add a stroke to edge it to give us an element that looks like chipboard. I love Rhonna Farrer’s swirls and I thin that they are well worth investing in for your digital toolbox and after this I hope that you will see how easy using brushes is. I have all my brushes installed and if you are having trouble installing brushes then shoot me an e-mail. Please don’t just leave me a comment because so many times I try to answer your questions and I get that “no reply” e-mail.

So – let open those brushes :D
I start by opening a new page. I happen to like working with the white background – but that is just a preference of mine and I will delete it at the end.

I am going to select my brush from the tool sidebar and it will give me my options at the top of my workspace.As you can see – I use the drop down menu to select what brush collection I want to use and then it will expand so that I can chose the brush I want.I need to do one more thing before I actually use my brush and that is create a new layer. Remember I told you that I was going to delete my background at the end; I need to create this layer so that I don’t delete my project.So here is a quick look at my screen Nothing to exciting – let’s fix that :D The first thing that we are going to do is just positin the brush on the page with our mouse and then give it a single left click. Make sure that you are working on Layer 1.
I don’t know what size this is going to be in my final layout so I am going to err on the big size and then shrink it to fit when I go to design my layout.The next thing I need to do is select a piece of paper and I am going to use black polka dots from Shabby Miss Jenn’s Gracie’s Garden for this. I have the two windows side by side.And I am simply going to drag and drop my black paper onto my brush design. When you do this you should not see your design. I have played with the opacity for the purpose of the tutroial.I am going to close my paper and expand my project. I want the dots to be smaller so I am going to shrink my paper to where it is just barely covers my brush design.

and now I can cut my design out from my brush by using the Ctrl G shortcut.

Viola ~ we have used a brush to create a perfectly matched element for your layout!

I am not quite done – I want it to look like chipboard so I am first going to add a stroke of white to outline the design. To do this I first going to delete my white background layer and flatten my image (this step is in another tutorial or e-mail me for help). I am going to use the stroke command found in the edit tab at the top of the screen.
When you select this you will get a window that asks you to select the pixel width of your outline and the color. For this I am using a pixel width of 5 and a white outline. FYI – when I outline pictures I use a pixel width of 20 to 35.Here is what we now have and we are almost done:
Remember I said I wanted to create a chipboard look; we do that by using the bevel feature in the Effect palate.I like the Simple Embossed bevel look so I pick that option and hit apply. I went ahead and added the drop shadow so that you could see the cardstock effect.

What do you think now? Easy huh :D

Please let me know if this tutorial was helpful and remember to e-mail me if you have questions – I’d love to help :D