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Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Lesson 35 of 36

Creating a Stitch Brush


Layering in Adobe Photoshop for Digital Scrapbookers

Lesson 35 of 36

Creating a Stitch Brush


Lesson Info

Creating a Stitch Brush

Let's move on to sitting okay stitching it's definitely more complicated than that um title work and all that kind of stuff, but what's really cool about stitching and I actually included this with the class once you do it once and you save your styles and you stay save your brushes, you never have to do to get you just can draw and, um, create your your stitching a lot easier, but we have to make the brushes and we have to make the layer styles first, so stitching consists of two different brushes and first we're going to make the actual stitch straight stitch brush. So what we want to dio is have a rounded rectangle tool, and we needed to be on black because we're going to create a brush and we wanted to be opaque and then we're going to draw kind of a long, skinny rectangle and it can actually be kind of big to begin with even though you wouldn't make a stitch this big because what we want is to make sure that it looks nice and rounded on the edges for a stitch and that does not tha...

t's not as round as it needs to be. So how you can change that as you can double click with your rounded rectangle and you can actually change the corner radius of your rectangle osama actually change it to one hundred all the way around every corner and when we draw it now has a much more curved and rounded appearance. Now if I were to draw that big again, then the radius wouldn't be enough because the bigger it gets, the smaller the radius is in rotation are in in relation to the stage so we can draw it um about that size and that's actually just about stitch size because with digital stitching, even though realistic stitching is very small and thin in real life because a really small thin stitch in real life wouldn't have a lot of visual impact, you wouldn't be able to see it on the computer very well, so I used I usually make my stitching look more like embroidery, which is going to be a little bit thicker and fatter, so we have this brush ready what's rast arise it and then you command click to get the marching ands and ed it define brush preset now I'm just gonna keep I'm just gonna show you for a minute if we just define that brush priest at the way it is right now, well, that doesn't look like stitching that just looks like a flat brush, so we actually to go in and edit this brush and we're going to go to brush presets on a fresh tip shape and we're going to change this spacing you're gonna want a lot of space between the two so it's gonna go really high let's go toe it's got a five hundred percent and see if that's enough so the thing is is that it looks like it overlaps here but really it's just a very small space in between the stitches and you want a really spot small space in between the stitches because we're going to be adding stitch holds in there too so five hundred percent is about right and then another thing that we need to dio is that we need to shape dynamics ok so we need to go to the shape dynamics and we need to make sure that the brush changes direction when we change direction so if I paint with a brush right now it's always going to be this flat so if I have a curved path at all it's not going to curve with the path so in order to do that always to do is turn the angle jeter on into direction and now we have a brush that will follow our direction okay so we're getting there we have the brush ready so let's save this new brush preset from this brush and I'm gonna save it as ditch okay so now let's just create a really quick line of stitching but we can add our layer style too and that's probably a little bit big for me but now that we have the stitching brush defined we can actually make it a little bit smaller so brush tip shape let's drop it down to fifty that's about right ok, so now we have this line of stitching and how do we make? How do we take it from this brush too a realistic looking stitch. So we go teo are layer styles dialogue and this is what we're going to be using for the entirety of making a stitch look realistic this is it. You go to color, overlay any color you want so if you want pink stitching, you convict pink if you want read you convict red, I'm just going to do white just because I normally do white sitting threat is typically white in my house and then we want to add a bevel in and boss and actually the stop evelyn and bosses and bad but let's change it just slightly to about one twenty five so it has a nice deep curve which in real life the stitching is so small it's not really gonna have that much of a bevel in real life, but when we're trying to translate things digitally it's going to have quite a bevel to try and fix or to try and make it have more visual wait, so we're going to change it to one twenty five and we're going to change the size eight when I dropped the multiply down so it's not such a harsh shadow here we go so now we have a stitch but it's still not super realistic there's no texture on it's just kind of a beveled line so let's add some texture to it we're actually going to go to the texture option and we need to load up the artist surfaces we're going to replace what's there and I actually use this for my stitching I'm even quite sure what it's called but it's what I settled on a long time ago and it works for me and you can't really see it yet but when it of the depth to one twenty five and oh yeah so the more let's talk about the death the more that you play with the depth the weirder it's gonna look so you just want to really slight texture ah and it's going to depend on what your color is so if you have a different color then the depth is going to need to be different I mean the the texture death is going to need to be different to really make sure it's visible you can also adjust size down a little bit but I like to go backto white make sure it looks right ok so we have a little bit of texture and are stitching is ready so like where did it go? You can't see it now so we have to ad holes tio are stitching and suman so we can really see I'm gonna add a colored background so it's a little bit more visible not black still blue was the lighter blue something that's not going to awful look at there we go come on people ok so now we've got a blue background so we can see so the stitching holes are actually a soft round brush and the hardness I bump up to about fifty percent now the size of the brush is going to depend on the size of your stitching but what you want it to look like is you wanted tio just slightly be larger than the space between the stitches because we're going to add a bevel to it and the bevel is going to make it what's going to make it look realistic so unfortunately and this is the downfall of stitching and yes I did this every single time I created any such you have to go in here and at every single whole by hand if you try and um you know space it out so that if you try and guess the spacing and space it out so that you could just run your brush across and I will always fill in the gaps in between with your brush pallets with the spacing right here you think that you figured it out but it gets off invariably every time so every single hole added in my hand every single time but that isn't realistic that was really unrealistic so we have tio add a bevel and make it a little bit less frightening instead of a blip big black brush we have ah hole so the layer cell for this is a bevel in and boss and it's called a pillow and boss which kind of adds the bevel to the outside edges of the thing and it makes it look like the stuff that's underneath the outside edges is indented and we have to reduce the the depth is one hundred percent the sizes four so it's pretty much just the stock um settings and then I'm gonna just the screen all the way up to one hundred so we have a really high highlight and we're getting there but we also have tio adjust the opacity and the phil so the opacity I like drop down to sixty and then the phil opacity which is going to leave the layer styles the rest of the layer styles alone I like to drop to eighty percent and now at this point because you're going to be making searching for your lay out on a case by case basis you can also change the color of the holes to match more of what your layout looks like because I was making them for every possibility I just left them black but you can change the color if you want to and then the last thing that we need to dio for the stitching is just add a little tiny shadow so that it looks like it's coming away from the page a little bit, but not a drop shadow. And we make the opacity thirty linear burn and the distance of two and the size of four, just a really tiny shadow. If that's still too much for you, you can reduce it down. So we're gonna make this a layer style new style stitching and then the shadow, a new style by clicking in the style pallet on stitch stitch hole. Okay, so now we have the stitching style and the shadows are the whole style. Save. And then we also need to save the brush for you for the whole, so I still have the brush, um, set to where it was. So you just add the new brush preset and make sure you name it stitching hole because you have all these round, fuzzy brushes and you won't know which is which.

Class Description


There are so many fun elements to work within digital scrapbooking, but making pages that are pleasing to the eye can be a surprisingly difficult task. In this class, Traci will teach you how to use basic Adobe Photoshop tools to improve the overall look of your layout. 

You’ll learn:

  • How to create realistic depth
  • Enhancing using the dodge and burn tool
  • Designing with lighting effects







I'm a photographer. I do a lot of graphic design for my business. I feel like I'm fairly knowledgeable. I saw this class being shown for free on Creative Live one day and it wasn't my first choice to watch, but was the best out of the list... I was wrong. This is a great class. I didn't expect to learn that much and I've been learning a lot! Great info!


This course was amazing. I learn some things I didn't know how to do. Traci is simple and straight forward in her teaching. Very easy to understand.