And Now For Some Paper!

As you can probably tell from the lack of posts, the digital scrapbook design progress has been a little slower than I originally thought. The lapse in time was partially due to life and this being a hobby, but it was also due to me scouring the internet and attempting to absorb as many digital design techniques as I can find. I feel that I have come a long way and to celebrate, I have created my first paper.

Download Diamonds and Flowers here.

This paper was created entirely using open source software - the same software used to create my first alphas - namely Inkscape and GIMP. I would love to find time to put together a full tutorial (maybe even with a matching video tutorial) but for now here's a quick summary of the steps I took to create this paper. First I created a vector diamond and tiled it using Inkscape. While I was in Inkscape, I also created a vector flower that I imported into GIMP and saved as a brush (the vector flower design is well beyond the scope of this write-up and is likely beyond the scope of a full paper making tutorial). I used the single diamond vector to create a GIMP brush as well by importing it into GIMP, dirtying it up a little with grunge brushes, and saving the result as a brush (this brush creation was much more friendly for tutorial creation and might appear in the full tutorial if the tutorial ever comes to fruition). Once the brushes were done and the base diamond tile was complete, I imported the vector pattern into GIMP and got to work. I added/blended some noise and stamped the diamond pattern with my new brushes to get the final result. I merged all of the layers and output the paper to PNG, so color will have to be added by the end user using a color layer with some type of blending mode applied. The download should include the gray "template" paper along with a blue and green version that I created for myself. Sorry, no nice design sample from my wife this time.

Thanks for stopping by My Part of the Page!

Happy scrapping,
Brian