Stained Glass – Digi Stamps

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Sketch Frenzy Friday layout – Did you post your entry yet?

Paper – Shabby Princess Seasonal Sampler or created by me
Elements – Stained Glass by me (see tutorial below) Brads by SP
Fonts – Pea Lissa
 

 

Show me how!!!

Choosing your image:  You can use digital stamps, coloring book pages, sketches, photos or clipart.  Just be sure that you are not violating any terms of use or copyright by altering the image.  Sometimes digital stamps are fine to use as it, but it’s rare.
For this demo, I’m using a custom shape pack from Adobe.  You can use your own images or download this Christmas Shapes pack.  (This pack will work with any program that supports .csh custom shapes.)  I’m working in Photoshop CS5, but this can be done in any program that supports layers.  I’ll also show you how to do it with a photo.

• Open a new document at 1000 x 900 pixels @ 200 ppi with a white background.
  
• Bring in your image and reduce the opacity to 50%.
  
• Create a new layer above the image

• With a 10 px hard brush, (100% opacity and 100% hardness) Trace the parts of the image that you want to use.  Take your time and clean up anything you don’t want.
  
• Here’s the outline I drew.  It works, but there are some issues – leading lines don’t just end in the middle.  They all connect to other leading lines.  It’s a stability thing. 

• So to fix that, we add more leading.  I did this in red so you can easily see the added sections.  I closed off where the feathers are on the wing tips and the tail.  The eye can’t be sitting out there not touching the sides, so that gets lines too.
  
• Look at your image and think about where you need to close off sections.

• Use the marquis tool to select an oval around your image (or square or circle – your choice)
  
• Stroke the selection with black at 12 px and deselect
  
• Now use the 10 px hard brush to draw in lines for the background.  Irregular shapes are best.
  
• When you finish, you’ll have the leading for your image.  You can fill with color, digital paper or a combination of both.

• For this image doing the background first really helps.  You can bring in paper, but I decided on a blue sky.
  
• Create a layer below the leading and fill with white.
  
• Change your foreground color to a sky blue and the background color to white.
  
• Use Filter, Render, Clouds
  
• Then Filter, Render, Blur, Motion blur at 44 degrees and 27 px – adjust if needed.
  
• Finally, Filter, Distort, Glass or Ocean Ripple.  I used Ocean Ripple with a size of 9 and magnitude of 10

• Here’s a shot of the texture
  
• Select the leading layer and choose your magic wand selection tool with tolerance at 25, add to selection and contiguous on
  
• Click on the space outside your outline (oval, square, whatever)
  
• Select the background layer again and press delete.  Deselect
  
• Looks good, but it would be better if the colors were varied in the different sections

• Select the leading layer and choose your magic wand selection tool with tolerance at 25, add to selection and contiguous on
  
• Click in the space between the lines of the background.  Choose several that do not touch.
  
• Select the background layer and bring up the hue and saturation pallet (ctrl or command U)
  
• Check colorize and adjust settings to change the hue
  
• Repeat with other sections of the background.

• Let’s fill the bird with digital paper
  
• Bring your paper into a new layer below the leading layer.
  
• Use Filter, Distort, Glass with distortion at 3, smoothness at 4, frosted and scaled at 172%
  
• Select the leading layer and choose your magic wand selection tool with tolerance at 25, add to selection and contiguous on
  
• Click in the space between the lines of the bird.  I like to do sections that are not touching, then shift the paper and do other sections, but you can do the whole thing at once.
  
• Select the paper layer and copy the selection to a new layer (ctrl or command J).  Deselect (ctrl or command D)
  
• Continue selecting section and copying them to a new layer until the bird is filled. Delete the paper layer
  
• Select all the bird layers and merge them back together

• Select the beak the same way you selected spaces above and fill on the bird layer with a golden yellow. Do not deselect
  
• Use Filter, Noise, Add Noise and reduce the size so you just some some texture in the space.
  
• Use Filter, Distort, Glass with distortion at 3, smoothness at 4, frosted and scaled at 172%
  
• Add a new layer above the bird layer, select the eye and fill with black.
  
• Apply this layer style to the eye layer

 
Last, make the leading layer look like leading with this layer style:



Here’s your finished stained glass piece.

  There’s another way to do stained glass with photos.  I’ll show you that another time.  For now, make some stained glass to use in your layouts and cards!