Showing posts with label creating paths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creating paths. Show all posts

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Clarifications on Pâquerette

Anke, over at Designer Digitals, asked a few questions about the Pâquerette layout (by the way, "pâquerette" simply means meadow daisy; I assume it derives its name from Pâques, Easter, because it starts growing again around that time of year. I have very fond memories of these from my childhood!):

Heather Taylor, Paquerette

There are a couple of fun things going on: the little leaves going around and around and out of the photo, and the "journaling sprigs" as Anke called them. It's all fairly easy:

For the leaves, I drew a path with a double loop and a little tail: double loop with tail I also drew a little leaf shape (helps if you draw it very large, then drastically reduce the size--gets rid of all those little jaggedies for you): little leaf I duplicated the leaf, flipped it, repositioned it to look like a typical leaf pair on a plant, then made it into a brush (I played around with the spacing in the brush palette, as well as the first set of options--make sure to set the middle one to "direction" so that the leaves flow nicely). Then, I went back to my loop path, and stroked the path with the little leaf brush. I grunged them up by erasing, dodging, adding some color here and there, and then set the layer to color burn, I think.

For the journaling, I just drew a simple arc path and typed on it--that part's really easy. The petals in the background are from a brush I made of one of my own daisy pictures. It's doubled up, and each is a different color and blending mode. I usually just play with all the options until I happen to find one that works--I rarely know just what I have to do to achieve a specific effect, it's mostly happenchance!

Thanks for asking, Anke!