Tiara Time

I've been trying all day to work on some art but just can't seem to accomplish a thing. So I finally gave up and sat down at the computer. Within a few minutes I had put this together. Easy to do in photoshop, but I think the technique would work in Microsoft Word (with maybe a few extra steps) or any other similar program.

I had been going through some of my stencils and stamps and came across this stamp sheet from Dylusions (I got mine from joggles.com, I think.) I zeroed in on the wording in the center of the top row.

Since the wording I wanted to use had to do with sparkling and tiaras, I thought of princesses, which immediately led me to my favorite colors (currently) of purple and pink. To make this color block, I opened a new file in photoshop. Then, using the brush tool, I selected a hot pink color and painted the color onto the top triangle portion of my canvas. Then I chose a purple and painted it onto the bottom portion. I did both of these at 100% opacity. Then I reduced the opacity to 50% and spot touched a few spots of lighter color onto each segment.

Next, I ran an action from mcpactions.com called Frosted Memories - Sliding, which caused the lines you see above. In that same action set, the Faded Edges step gave me the white edging you see around the canvas.

Then I typed the wording in a dark purple, using the font Zapfino. I saved that, then copy and pasted the same words over the purple, but in white. This gives you the shadow effect you see. Then I saved this file onto my desktop.

Now for the fun part - the layering. I thought about how I wanted my final product to be presented. I wanted to still use the colors pink and purple in a matted variation. I'm sure there must be an easier way to do this, but this is the way I know. I opened another new file in photoshop, painted the whole box purple, and saved it onto the desktop.

Then I opened another, painted it pink, and saved it onto the desktop.

I layered the boxes this way. I dragged the purple box onto a new file. It fit the entire new window. Then I dragged the pink box onto the top of the purple one. It covered the entire thing, so I held down the shift button, and used the arrows to reduce the size of the pink box. I dragged the smaller pink box flush to the lower right-hand corner. Next I dragged the text box onto the top of the pink and purple box. It covered the whole box, so again I held down the shift button and used the arrows to re-size the text box. I dragged it towards the upper left corner until I thought it looked fine. Last, I used a brush from Scrap Girls to make the scrolled accent in the lower corner. I saved the whole file as one piece and posted it here.

It really is easy to do. Please let me know if you need help. I have done something similar in microsoft Word, so I know it is possible. You just never know when you might have one of those princess and tiara-sparkly-stuff kind of days and need to know how to do this!