Aged Text With Pictures Tutorial!!!

Alrighty folks, so this is my FIRST tutorial EVER, so bear with me. For Christmas I made these for my Mother in Law and after posting them on Facebook on The Wood Connection's wall, I had a question about how I did it.

I told the person who asked the question I'd try to get a tutorial going and so this is that.

This is what we are aiming for:

I'll admit that my first go around turned out differently than this one will. But I think I like the second version better and it's more of what I was originally going for!

So here goes the tutorial.

I am working with Paint Shop Photo Pro X3, but I'm sure most graphic programs can accomplish the same thing, you'll just need to be familiar with your particular program.

AGED TEXT WITH PICTURES

#1. Find the book, newspaper, song, etc. you'd like to work with.
(I'm sure there are scrapbook papers out there somewhere that fit this purpose, but both times I've done this I've worked with sheet music and books I owned. For this case I'm using a Harry Potter book as my son loves this series. I wanted to use a different book, but I couldn't find it. The book I wanted actually has his name in it...)

#2. Scan whatever text you've chosen into your computer.
(If you are using a digital paper, you won't need to do this.)

3. Rotate your image if necessary
(I really thought mine scanned in crooked, but then after rotating, I think I messed it up worse... You will have to play with the settings to get the right angle.)

4. Crop if necessary

(I found that after rotating my image, it gave me more white space than I needed. I then cut off the excess.)

5. Age your text

This is done by clicking EFFECT - PHOTO EFFECTS - SEPIA TONING.
You will then adjust the sepia toning to whichever color best suits your mood.

6. Open a new document

7. Decide if you'll need to resize your sepia text.
The original size of my text was a little too big to enter multiple times on the new document like I wanted. So I had to resize until I was happy with the fit.

8. Copy the sepia text

9. Paste the sepia text onto your New Document

You can paste your text in whichever direction and placement suits you. I did the first one in odd ways and the one I did for this tutorial I just kept straight up and down.

10. After you're are done pasting, you can close your original text document.
It'll save some computer space and memory!

11. Once you finish pasting, SAVE this new completed document!!!

12. Choose your 1st picture.

13. See what size your picture is.

In the toolbar click IMAGE, followed by RESIZE, take note of the size of your picture, then hit CANCEL. DO NOT click SAVE. You don't want to mess up your picture.

14. Open a new document

Give this image the size of your picture that you wrote down in #13.

15. Copy your picture.

16. Paste your picture onto the NEW DOCUMENT as a NEW LAYER

17. Delete extra area that you don't want to use for your picture.

This is seriously the step that takes the longest. You can start out by using the MAGIC WAND and changing the TOLERANCE.

18. Towards the end you'll probably have to use the ERASER tool to get the areas right by what you want to keep.

You don't have to get this perfect. You do want it to be fairly smooth, but because we will be changing the coloring to black and white, you don't have to get every little pixel that you don't want gone.

19. When you have it all done, it should look similar to this:

Only you should have a transparent background. When I saved it for this tut, I accidentally saved a jpg instead of a gif or png. Therefore, I lost my transparency.

20. Crop picture down if needed.

You can see in the above example how much white space I had. I had to crop my picture down so I only had what I needed.

21. You'll now want to MERGE LAYERS together.

22. Now you'll got back to EFFECTS - PHOTO EFFECTS - BLACK & WHITE FILM

23. Resize image if needed

You'll want to see how this is going to look on your finished product, if it's too big make it the size you want. It'll take some playing around to get it just right.

24. Copy picture

25. Paste AS A NEW LAYER onto your full text image

26. Make sure you click on your picture layer NOT the text layer and...

27. Change OPACITY

This is another step where you can suit it to your liking

28. You can leave your picture looking like that and go to step 32 OR...

29. Double click on your picture layer

30. In the window that comes up change the BLEND MODE to HARD LIGHT

31. At this point you may need to READJUST the OPACITY

32. Add a drop shadow.

Effects - 3D Effects - Drop Shadow

33. Follow Steps 12 - 32 with a different picture

34. When you have both pictures on your page, make sure you click on each picture layer separately and do the following:

ADJUST - BRIGHTNESS/CONTRAST
Change the contrast to your liking

35. Add text and or word art to your liking.

Adjust placement of text, word art and pictures if needed.

36. Save as a .jpg and print off to be framed or put onto the photo blocks found at The Wood Connection!

This was my completed picture. I wasn't quite sure which one I liked best, so I saved all three...What do you guys think?

SUPPLY LIST:

Pictures were snapshots taken by me

WORD ART - Bethany Harty
TEXT - Miserably Lose

'Tis The Season

For gift giving and decorating and all that fun stuff.

This post is going to be everywhere as I'm just making a single post for all the Christmas fun we made this year....Are you ready for the ride?

To start we'll begin with a couple decorations I made for the season. (Not that we really needed anything else - but it was my birthday and I spent my money on it. I was happy.)

Here are my Christmas people:


Now the sales girl made a comment about the soldier and said not many people buy the soldier. I didn't say anything to her because it was BLACK FRIDAY and the place was PACKED, but I will share my reason with you.

Years ago, when I was a little girl, I remember my Dad making this soldier out of flower pots. It was awesome and I was in love with these cute little soldiers. Plus seeing my Dad doing something so creative was interesting. So I've had a place in my heart for soldiers for years!

The elf was just cute and Santa well - it's SANTA!

And not that it means anything, I just thought it was cute so I also bought this:


Next comes the neighbor gift.

I'm usually the girl who has tons of cool ideas for gifts to give the neighbors BUT Christmas comes and goes WAY TOO FAST and before I know it the neighbors are forgotten. This year I was going to be better and I made my mind up to do so.

So shortly after my birthday I made Eric take me to The Wood Connection. I knew exactly what I wanted to do and darn it all I was going to make neighbor gifts this year!

This is what I made:



I do like some better than others, but I won't say which way is which.

And guess what? I realized I forgot 4 of our bestest friends in the neighborhood. Who does that? Me! So, it was back to The Wood Connection so I could finish up with these:


Not sure I'm as crazy about the color combo of these ones, but at least one of the families really liked the coloring and it went GREAT in their living room.

Because I didn't keep busy enough with little individual letters, I gave myself more work to do.

Both my Daddy and my Father in Law are BYU Cougar fans and when I saw these letters at The Wood Connection I knew I had found THE PERFECT Christmas gift for my Dad's. These are their 'Y's':


I laughed because both men asked what the twine was for. Men just don't get the whole 'making things a little more cutesy' aspect. I just didn't feel it was complete until the twine was put on.

For my uncle I did a subway art thing. He's had a difficult life, so I wanted to put words that would uplift him and memories that made him happy on it. I think it made a real impression with him:


My older brother recently moved to France to teach. He wasn't able to come home for Christmas and my mom wanted to do something for him, but didn't know what. I had the BRILLIANT (LOL) idea to have each family member say a sweet something or other on video and I would compile it and email it to him. This is that video, but you have to promise not to watch anything but me at 5:46 and the little kids starting at 9:05.



(I should've told my little brother - who took over videotaping for my snippet - to zoom out...You're getting a lot of chest coming at you from me...Uh, yeah. Sorry about that)

For my mother in law I got inventive. Sort of.

I saw this picture where the person was in black and white and there was bookprint lettering in the background. I LOVED the look and wanted to do a similar thing. Well, I don't really have any old books to scan in and so then I thought of using music. It worked out well.

Then I had to figure out how to get the image just right. Well I never got it in black and white EXACTLY, but I did figure something out and I loved it. So I kept with it.

I apologize for not really having any sort of tutorial in place for this, but if I get a request for a tutorial I will gladly do one....

Here's the completed picture:


Anyway, so I had planned to print these off and stick them in a frame, but when I was at The Wood Connection I saw a different way of displaying them that I liked A LOT better so I went with it.

This was a SIMPLE project. I painted the back and sides of the wood block, with very little paint on the front (the picture will cover the majority of it):


Then I mod podged the pictures to it. I painted the little bauble thing to put in the top, tied a ribbon around it and it was complete:


Such a fun, easy, but wonderful gift.

Now this gift was the same as the one for my mil, but it was made for my brother in law's on again, off again girlfriend. They were 'off' when we last heard, but last year was the same story and she showed up on Christmas and we had nothing for her.

This year I wanted to be prepared. So, I made her a quick little scrapbook page thing to put on the block. It was cute enough.


Sadly, she didn't show up this year and they may be done for good, but either way I can still keep this in my home as this girl was such a pivotal person in our lives.

Works Well Under Pressure

So, I discovered that sometimes I need a deadline to actually get things done. As I mentioned before my mother in law and I had planned to give her mother a photobook for Christmas of our trip out to visit her this past summer.

Well, December was sneaking up on us and we wanted time to get the book printed and shipped so that she would get her gift around Christmas and not after!

It took me probably 3 afternoons of really plugging at this to get these last few pages done in the book.

Because I was in a time crunch I didn't really keep track of the supplies I used. I can tell you that almost every single kit I used was purchased from MyMemories and all the layouts I scraplifted from some of the more recent issues of Creating Keepsakes Magazine.

Here are the rest of the pages from our trip to Nebraska this past summer. Also keep in mind my Mother in Law did a few pages as well and I don't have those copies...