MellowButterfly Team Blog

As you’ve become more familiar with digital scrapbooking and your layouts have become more complex, you’ve probably noticed that something’s not quite right.

Maybe with your shadows perhaps? Especially on those multi-dimensional elements like flowers and leaves and butterflies? Yes?

You’d be right, of course. These elements don’t sit flat like paper, so their shadows would be different. When you look at real paper embellishments, you see that they stand out from the paper and cast a very different shadow – often longer and darker and differently shaped.

This tutorial explains how to get a more convincing three-dimensional effect with your digital elements in Photoshop.

While the instructions are step-by-step, a working knowledge of Photoshop’s tools and layers would be advisable.

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Welcome to Mellowbutterfly’s first tutorial! We’re covering basic information on working with brushes in this post, specifically Michelle’s “Rain” brush available in the shoppe. For those of you experienced with brushes, you might just want to check out the pictures for some inspiration. For those of you who maybe aren’t so familiar or don’t know how to start using these specific brushes, hopefully this will help a little!

There are all sorts of brushes that can be used for scrapbook layouts. Ones that look like regular stamped images (symbols, word art, etc), ones that can be used to add texture and depth to elements like background papers and embellishments and natural brushes that mimic certain scenes from nature, to name a few.

No matter what program you work with, there are two specific ways of applying brushes to your work. One way is by “stamping” with a specifically-designed stamp brush; this is literally a “one-click” image that you stamp onto your work with your paintbrush tool much as you would a real stamp with ink on paper. The other way of applying brushes to your work is painting with what’s known as a dynamic brush. These are brushes that are designed for the artist to paint with rather than just stamp.

Michelle’s rain brush is a great example of a brush set that provides both stamp and dynamic brushes. These brushes aren’t just pictures or textures, but representations of elements of nature. This is a brush that would often leave people wondering how on earth to effectively use it and get a worthwhile result and we’ve recently had a question from our own ‘Flygirl Scribbler as to how to do just that.

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