All Torn Up

Before we start anything, I want to wish my darling husband, Pan, the best of birthday wishes. Happy Birthday, honey.

Torn paper... normally I would leave that up to the experts but I have had a request and my attempts at trying to locate a psp tutorial have come to naught. That doesn't mean they are there, I just couldn't find them. Bear with me as I am trying to recall this from memory and trying to alter several ps tutorials I did find.

Open the paper and promote layer (Layers>Promote Background Layer). Pull out one of the corners so that the image is similar to this:


Use the rectangle marquee to select the area you DO NOT want and delete.


Set the viewing size to 50% (in overview window on right).


Scroll to a far side. Click eraser and get the Hellcat Tear 4 brush we made last time (if you hover cursor over brushes, it will pop up with name and description of the brush).


Set size to 999.


Place brush so jagged edge is completely on paper. Click.


Scroll over and place the left side of brush next to the right side of previous erasure.


As you can see, it left a rather straight edge. Getting ready to fix that.


Take your eraser brush and place a portion of it over the jag with the straight edge and click.


Continue across repeating the last few steps.


All we have to do now is to make it a little more realistic looking, don't you think? Layers>Duplicate. Select bottom layer. Go to Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Hue, Saturation and Lightness.


Set the Hue and Saturation to 0 and lightness to 76.


Get your Move tool, then holding down the control key, hit the up arrow twice. This will move the bottom layer up so that you can see it just above your torn paper. Almost finished.


Go to Effects>Texture Effects>Texture.


Select canvas simple.


Size: 100%; Smoothness: 0; Depth: 1; Ambience and Shininess: 0; Color: White; Angle: 315; Intensity: 50; Elevation: 50. Save these settings as "paper tear texture" so you won't have to keep looking them up each time you make a torn paper.


Looking better. But still a couple of steps left.


Click on top layer. Effects>3D>Drop Shadow.


Vertical and Horizontal offset: 0; opacity: 30; Blur: 3; Color: #100c0a. Save as paper tear shadow.


The drop shadow just makes a very subtle change. Merge>Merge Visible and save as a png file (maybe use the same name as the paper but add a te, for torn edge, at the end).


Your torn paper is ready to use, so go have some fun and happy scrapping.

Element Blues

Still working on the Karate pages.  I had some specific items in mind.  Getting them to actually look nice was a hard feat.  Luckily Tink has helped me yet again.  There are a couple of different 'plug-in' programs you can get to help you with your work in PSP.  One is SuperBladePro and another is called Eye Candy 4000.  I bought the SuperBladePro plug-in and still don't have it down pat.  Just because there are a lot of free environments and textures, doesn't mean they do what I want!  I wanted a Yin Yang with some texture.  Here is what I created on my own:

Not bad, but not what I really wanted.  So I went looking for more textures and elements.  I found a ton of stuff in every color BUT black.  Which is when I created this one:

I like it but I really wanted the black to have some dimension to it as well.  Time to call Tink.  Yep, she had what I needed.  Here is what I created with the stuff she sent me:

I love it.  I might see if we can smooth it out more like the white but I'm not to worried about it.  First, it won't be this big on my page and it looks much better smaller.  Second, I don't want to give up the lighting effect which might happen if we smooth it out any.

More as I work through the details of my karate pages!