Mask Workshop (2024)

[fiona cook]

Lesson 7. For my local woodland photo I ran a Corel freebie script called Gradient_8, which made the light flare stronger and brightened the colours overall.

For the mask I used a brush tip called Shape7. The circular design was not solid like a dot so I filled the centre of the mask with a rectangular selection flood filled black. I needed to move my mask but made a silly mistake and didn't duplicate the Mask Group before Merging the Group so was able to move it but lost the layers for future editing. Duh!

For the dotty background effect I used the same circular brush tip Shape7,

Text: I chose a condensed font to replicate the tallness of the trees, called Mekanik. The words are from another verse of the poem, Trees,  by Joyce Kilmer. Ann, I have just read that the poet died at the age of 31 in WW1. What a waste but what a legacy of words.

[Gerry Landreth]

13 hours ago, Cassel said:

@Susan EwartNot many people have spikes like that at home. My husband found some beside the railroad by our house and managed to invent a game with those. I'll try to find where he posted it on the internet. I love how you manipulated that background paper to create a totally different effect. If you want to do extractions, check this article. That is my favorite technique.

@Carolyn RyeYou are doing great with those masks!

@kasanySince you ended up with a straight edge on the left, you could consider moving the whole mask to the left so the edge of the photo won't look like anything is cut off and it will look intentional.

@RandyThat is an interesting idea to use the same image as a background. Have you considered using it diagonally? You can check this tutorial. The blue plaid is great and definitely not overpowering. You must have selected a great section to get that "subtle" design.

@MoniqueN.Simple layouts are fun to make because they are faster, and yes, it does put the focus on the photo OR the text.

@Emerald JayBeautiful photos and nicely showcased!

@Jen Brown You earn extra points with such cute kitties!!!

@Ann SeeberCombining a colored photo and a black-and-white photo with a mask gives a great effect.

@Anne LampThat subtle layer of the photo in the background makes that page very interesting.

@Gerry LandrethThat script creates a great effect. I think that the shadow on the title is inconsistent with the typical light sources. Can you consider putting them in the opposite direction?

@Marie-ClaireKeep those brush strokes handy. You can use them as masks later too!

@Donna SilliaI am sorry to have made you addicted to layered fonts! LOL

@Corrie KinkelIsn't that good that those rocks are just digitals?

@Harmony BirchDid you rotate your lace after adding the shadows? It looks like it is not consistent as it is going to the right, and not the bottom right. is the Butterfly font a layered font?

@fiona cookThat Blend mode really makes the colors pop!

@Bonnie BallentineYou are always having such interesting adventures!

 

Carole - I was overthinking the shadows. I used a cut-out for the title and exaggerated the shadow. Below is a revised version with normal shadowing.

[Marie-Claire]

9 hours ago, Ann Seeber said:

Really nice! Is that some sort of tracker that Poncho is wearing?

Thank you Ann, and no, it is not a tracker, what you probably see is the lock on his harness.

[Ann Seeber]

LESSON 6 - ANNA & TJs wedding reception. (I will also post this in our wedding forum this month.) Hard to believe it's been almost 12 years! I played with brushes and ended up using corner punches and the wedding bell is also a punch. (in the mask) The text font is Tempus Sans. The frame is called Transparent01 in the PSP frame collection.

Edited February 18 by Ann Seeber

[sharon thompson]

22 hours ago, fiona cook said:

Great design and sentiment. Not sure I understood how you would use a brush stroke as a PNG. Doesn't that make your file overall huge in memory size?

I convert abr files to a series of pngs using the abrMate freeware. Then I manipulate the pngs with all the PSP tools like any other png. For some things, brushes make more sense and are easier to use but, a lot of the times, pngs are easier to use since you don't have to deal with all those brush settings. Plus, if you have a lot of brushes, you can easily find a specific png in your files rather than scrolling through all the imported brushes. Just a personal preference. I am sure that there are many who adore brushes & can use them with ease. 

[sharon thompson]

Just now, MoniqueN. said:

Me too!

Are you actually installing all your fonts? I loved the older versions of PSP where you could open a font in your workspace & it would show up for your use in your PSP font menu. When you were finished with it, you could close your project, including that open font. That way fonts did not have to be permanently installed. When newer PSP versions no longer had that neat trick, I snagged a freeware thing called FontLoader. You use it as a little stand alone program and browse to your fonts folders and add the fonts that you want to use to it then tell it to load them. It loads them into the font part of windows so they show up in any program that is set to use windows fonts. So, if I put a font into FontLoader, it will show up in PSP, Photoshop, Word, Wordperfect, Open Office etc. When you finish your project and shut down the program you were using, you then unload the font from FontLoader. That way, you can have thousands of fonts stored in a file somewhere, and only temporarily load the ones you need. It keeps your font lists inside programs short and manageable. And, since you can organize your fonts anyway you want in your computer files, it is easier to find a suitable holiday font, handwriting font, grunge font, fat font, etc. I also use FontRunner to show me samples of what all the fonts in a specific folder will look like (using "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" sentence as the sample). Both of these freeware programs are small and very simple to use so you can manage thousands of fonts easily. You probably don't need an intervention as much as these two little portable tools.

[Anja Pelzer]

day 6 , using a mask by Jessica Dunn and another mask by Rachel Martin

font is Arnold Story, I made 2 Linoleumpapers and filled a selectionsborder with the darker one

 

[Marie-Claire]

Day 5
Monoline fonts : Simplefire and Grape Escape

[Donna Sillia]

Instead of dots, I used the tube that I made of a pineapple. This mask gave me fits, mainly because I was using wrong settings. The photo was sent to me by my grandson when he was in Vietnam to play rugby. The font is a free font called Peel. I made it a layered font by duplicating it, changing the color of one font and moving it into a lower position. The border is the kaleidoscope.

[Susan Ewart]

4 hours ago, Sue Thomas said:

Like all North Americans, the Candians are not any different, they call the spanner a wrench, pipe wrench or  monkey wrench.   I have and always will call them  spanners.  The word spanner is derived from a German word.  It's inventor was  Swedish several hundred years ago.  I've had this conversation with many Canadians  who didn't know what a spanner was, over the years. 

This is so cool, "Spanner"  I watch a photographer on Youtube and he has an English accent.  I don't know where he actually lives, but he photographed a wrench like I have and he called it a spanner.  I only knew he meant that because it was the only thing he was photographing.  I have never heard that term before.  

[Susan Ewart]

4 hours ago, fiona cook said:

Lesson 7. For my local woodland photo I ran a Corel freebie script called Gradient_8, which made the light flare stronger and brightened the colours overall.

For the mask I used a brush tip called Shape7. The circular design was not solid like a dot so I filled the centre of the mask with a rectangular selection flood filled black. I needed to move my mask but made a silly mistake and didn't duplicate the Mask Group before Merging the Group so was able to move it but lost the layers for future editing. Duh!

For the dotty background effect I used the same circular brush tip Shape7,

Text: I chose a condensed font to replicate the tallness of the trees, called Mekanik. The words are from another verse of the poem, Trees,  by Joyce Kilmer. Ann, I have just read that the poet died at the age of 31 in WW1. What a waste but what a legacy of words.

Fiona, this such a beautiful and peaceful photo.  I love that shape design you used and the effect on the paper is really cool.

[Susan Ewart]

3 hours ago, Ann Seeber said:

LESSON 6 - ANNA & TJs wedding reception. (I will also post this in our wedding forum this month.) Hard to believe it's been almost 12 years! I played with brushes and ended up using corner punches and the wedding bell is also a punch. (in the mask) The text font is Tempus Sans. The frame is called Transparent01 in the PSP frame collection.

Beautiful Ann, I love seeing your frames, you really got the eye for them.  

[Susan Ewart]

2 hours ago, sharon thompson said:

Are you actually installing all your fonts? I loved the older versions of PSP where you could open a font in your workspace & it would show up for your use in your PSP font menu. When you were finished with it, you could close your project, including that open font. That way fonts did not have to be permanently installed. When newer PSP versions no longer had that neat trick, I snagged a freeware thing called FontLoader. You use it as a little stand alone program and browse to your fonts folders and add the fonts that you want to use to it then tell it to load them. It loads them into the font part of windows so they show up in any program that is set to use windows fonts. So, if I put a font into FontLoader, it will show up in PSP, Photoshop, Word, Wordperfect, Open Office etc. When you finish your project and shut down the program you were using, you then unload the font from FontLoader. That way, you can have thousands of fonts stored in a file somewhere, and only temporarily load the ones you need. It keeps your font lists inside programs short and manageable. And, since you can organize your fonts anyway you want in your computer files, it is easier to find a suitable holiday font, handwriting font, grunge font, fat font, etc. I also use FontRunner to show me samples of what all the fonts in a specific folder will look like (using "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" sentence as the sample). Both of these freeware programs are small and very simple to use so you can manage thousands of fonts easily. You probably don't need an intervention as much as these two little portable tools.

I use a Font Viewer too.  So not technically needing to "load" them.  I probably should have said I have lots of ZIP files to unzip.  My font viewer updates when I turn it on.  I can choose to leave it on or off as I have enough system resources now that it doesn't bog down.  As a habit I do turn it off and it stays pinned to the bottom task bar (or whatever that bar at the bottom of Windows is called).  

[Susan Ewart]

1 hour ago, Anja Pelzer said:

day 6 , using a mask by Jessica Dunn and another mask by Rachel Martin

font is Arnold Story, I made 2 Linoleumpapers and filled a selectionsborder with the darker one

 

I LOVE chickens!  this is fabulous and the lino paper is perfectly done for this layout.

[Susan Ewart]

1 hour ago, Marie-Claire said:

Day 5
Monoline fonts : Simplefire and Grape Escape

OMG! so cute!  How do you say no to a face like that?

[Donna Sillia]

4 minutes ago, Susan Ewart said:

I use a Font Viewer too.  So not technically needing to "load" them.  I probably should have said I have lots of ZIP files to unzip.  My font viewer updates when I turn it on.  I can choose to leave it on or off as I have enough system resources now that it doesn't bog down.  As a habit I do turn it off and it stays pinned to the bottom task bar (or whatever that bar at the bottom of Windows is called).  

I use NexusFont and Character Map UWP. I unzip my fonts as I download them and put them in both places. I leave NexusFont open when I am working on text so that the uninstalled fonts are available to me. Character Map is so that I can get a good view of the font and the glyphs. I also save the files on my external hard drive.

[Susan Ewart]

Day 5 in the bag!

I was able to use the Pencilsketch2 script for this (yay).  then i made a mask to bring through the colors of the glitter and make up (used for crafts not my face).  then I did some more selection and promoting so i could add some shadows to the box the glitter was in and to the little container rims. Then I thought the splotches looked funny on the background paper so I decided to try some different sorts of shadowing.  I think more extractions (just with magic wand) was needed to do shadows in the recessed way.  One layout will show the little splotches floating and the other recessed.  the script background that was created was perfect for this layout and I added gaussian blur several times.  The background paper is Riley B Graphics (Creative Fabrica).  the Font is Goodnight (italic version) with a blend mode of overlay - I think.  Here is the "floating" island version. 

[Susan Ewart]

Day 5

...And here is the recessed version.  

[sharon thompson]

Day 7 - There is just something fun about polka dots.....  No problems with this one. I used a soft light blend mode twice on the dots for the paper. The bow is from Pngitem.com & the font is Script MT.  As for that day 3 assignment that gave me so much trouble, it was, as suggested, a mistake on my part. I did click on greyscale rather than negative image and that was my undoing. I did redo the image but, to be honest, the blood splattered paper that I wanted to use did not compliment the rest of the elements. The error ridden image one that I posted earlier is, in fact, the better result. So much for happy accidents or, in my mistake, stupid blunders. Thank you to Casell for all the great mask lessons. Now if you have any beginners brush lessons.......... Many thanks. Sharon

 

[Corrie Kinkel]

Day 7 and already the last day of this workshop 😭. I have enjoyed looking at all the work done by everyone, such a variety and all from the same lessons!

For the mask I didn't use scallops but the "pinky shears" and therefore no dots but little squares. The mask has a rather heavy blur because my photo is blurred also and I didn't liked the hard edges on the mask for this particular photo. The font is Bastro and just an embellishment that went with the photo. Sometime ago I got the branche and pinecone on digitalscrapbook.com. The last thing I did was making a very small frame around the page. 

Edited February 18 by Corrie Kinkel

[Anja Pelzer]

now I finished day 7, I used the mask I made in the last Maskworkshop. I made a pattern with 4 different colors - angel45, the background with gaussian blur.

the brad and silhouettes are from Zookits made by CSSD and ljd at Gingerscraps

[Gerry Landreth]

Day 7.

The picture is my cousin's house in Northern California. She loves holiday decorating and snow. 

The papers, Winter Day, are by Janet Kemp at Digital Scrapbook. The ribbon was created using Cassel's "Attached Ribbon" script. Instead of polka dots, I used snowflakes.

[Susan Ewart]

Day 6

I used the mask technique (selection/modify/feather) from lesson 5.  I added a black layer under my lino layer and then reduced the opacity of the lino layer to get it darker.  I used the Pencilsketch2 script and used a mask to bring back the items (oddities?) in the containers.  I also extracted those containers to be able to put a shadow on them and also the the box so I could shadow it too.  The background of the pencilsketch part is from Riley B Graphics (Creative Fabrica).  Fonts are Giorna Velusca (for the title) and Gilnger (for the rest) both from Creative Fabrica.  the layout title has a bevel added as well.

Day 7 will come later in the week.  the Office of Oddities is a riff on the Instagram posts from Office of Collecting; fun and eclectic stuff to see there.

Edited February 19 by Susan Ewart

[Susan Ewart]

Day 6

here is the inside cover if you can read the blurry one above

[Carolyn Rye]

Day 6 with the Mask Workshop.  I have be able to learn so much.  The new way to doing backgrounds is great and fun to do.