A word art freebie and tutorial

As I was packaging up my latest release It occurred to me that some of you might not be aware of a really easy way to recolor elements that I use all of the time. Before I get into this quick tutorial, let’s start things of with freebie!

Word Art Originals No. 1

We’ll download this one the old fashioned way here.

I’m sad to say I’m having problems with my new store plugin. It’s not sending emails the way it is supposed to. I’m REALLY bummed about this because it means I may be back to square one with my store and back to something much more complicated . Please email me if you have any problems with a purchase, or in downloading any of my other freebies. I can send the links out manually, but the auto emails don’t seem to be working right. Thanks for your patience!

And now for the Tutorial

How many of you know how to lock the transparent pixels on a layer in photoshop or photoshop elements? Many of you may know this trick, but if you don’t, this is really going to come in handy! I work in photoshop, but I looked it up and this should work in elements as well.

As an example, lets say you just love my new word art freebie but the problem is that you want to use it in a layout with a dark background. I’ll show you an easy way to change the color of a single element that is all one color (such as the word happiness by it self) as well as how to change just part of an element if you don’t want to effect the whole layer.

1) The the first thing you need to do is to select the layer.
2) Then click on the “lock transparent pixels” icon in the layers pallet. (see tutorial image 1 below)

After you click that icon, your layers pallet should look like tutorial image 2 below. Because I don’t have pse, I’m just showing an example of how I think it will look. It should be similar to what you see in the photoshop pallet.

Now if you a re-coloring a single element like the word happiness on a layer by it self, the next step 3) would be to go to the select menu and choose all, or press command A ( ctr A on a pc). You will also need to choose a color. In the example I will use white, but you can also use the eyedropper tool to choose any color you might want to use. 4) Once you have chosen your color go to edit – fill. You can choose foreground color, background color, or you can also choose color to to select a new color (rather than the eyedropper tool). (see tutorial image 3 below)

Now, if you look at tutorial image 4 below you will see that this method worked well for the word happiness by it self, but if you use select all on an element like the word art cluster the results are not very good.

For an element such as this, which has several different colors of text, as well as some full color elements we can use a slightly different process to change the words that are brown, to white. Follow steps 1) and 2) above. Now instead of choosing select – all, use the marque tool (see tutorial image 5) to select just the word “this”. with that selected, hold the shift key and marque around the words “is boundless”. Holding the shift key will add to the selection. You should now have two boxes of “marching ants” around the text that is brown.

Now fill with a color of your choice as in step 4). This will fill only the areas selected with the marque tool, and the transparent areas will also remain unchanged.

So there you have it. Hope this tutorial is helpful. Oh, one last trick. Once you have an area (all or marque) selected you can press option delete to fill with the foreground color and command delete to fill with the background color (probably option and ctrl. on a pc).

Tagged as: blog freebie, digital scrapbooking, digital scrapbooking freebie, free, freebie scrap, scrap freebie, template, word art