Custom brushes are among the most important tools in a professional graphic design toolbox. If you use Photoshop or Gimp for digital scrapbooking design, you already know how helpful professionally designed custom brushes can be in designing layouts for your scrapbook pages. You can tile them to create backgrounds, or use them as stamps to create accents on individual pages.
While some graphic designers are experts at modifying and creating their own brushes, many rely on the amazing supply of freely available custom brushes available online. Those designers frequently assemble their own "toolboxes" of downloaded custom brushes that they can access when they need them. There are disadvantages, of course - including the time you spend hunting down the brushes that you need and the time that you spend categorizing them so you can find them easily. Add to that the time you spend sorting through your collection of brushes for Gimp and Photoshop and you can easily spend a good chunk of your designing time in the far-less-pleasant task of trying to locate the right brush for your design.
The solution is a professional graphic design toolbox in a most unlikely form - on paper. A book of brushes makes it easy for you to page through digital images of the available brushes and so you can find just the one you need. Once you locate the right brush, upload it to your computer from the included DVD and voila!
Now that you've got the brushes, what can you do with them? Here are four different ways to use digital brushes from your professional graphic design toolbox in scrapbooking.
Tile brushes to create scrapbook papers: Print your own scrapbook papers with digital brushes. Just open a brush, lay out a grid in your graphics file, and stamp the brush in each grid.
Create borders on your scrapbook papers: Bordered pages are one of the most basic elements in scrapbooking. Choose a brush that you like - black cats for those pages of your kids at Halloween, maybe? Start with a blank file and stamp your brush around the edges of your page.
Use GIMP brushes to create photo frames on your scrapbook pages: Import your photos into your layout and size them to fit your design. Now create a new transparent layer, open a brush tile pattern and carefully stamp around the edges of the photo to create a frame.
Create a cutout frame from a solid brush: Love that sunburst and think it would make the perfect frame for your daughter's bright smile? It's easier to do than you think. Start with the photo in place on your page, and then create a new layer in your file. Then open the brush and adjust the size to cover the photo before stamping the brush over the photo. Using the select tool to select the stamp you just made, decide how many pixels wide you want your frame to be. Then simply decrease the selection by that number of pixels, and delete the center of the selection to show the photo in the layer below.
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About the Author
Chris Robertson is a published author of Majon International. All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2011 (Fri Feb 18 2011) Majon International. Majon International is one of the worlds MOST popular internet marketing and internet advertising companies on the web. Visit their main business resource internet marketing web site at: http://www.majon.com
