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Tuesday Tutorials – Digital Shadowing

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So for those of you who are not into digital scrapbooking, this post is going to be a bit dull. Tuesdays are going to be my tutorial days and honestly, I don't have that much I'm good at, except accounting, selling real estate, and digi-scrapping. Oh, and reading. And editing, but I shouldn't add that one because as soon as I do, you'll find a typo in a blog post.

So anyhoo - one of the most important elements on a digi-scrapping page is not an element at all. Its a farce. A fake-out. Its the shadow. Everything needs to have a shadow or your page looks flat. And flat does not look real. So here's an example of a simple layout. Forget, for now, how gorgeous my daughter looks with her new haircut, and how beautifully her hair blends with this orange background. That's not important for the lesson, LOL.

Now, you can tell that things are layered, because they cover each other up, but they still look flat. Let's add some dimension. Some items are "heavier" than others, in real life, and therefore, create bigger shadows. So the shadow from a piece of flat paper is less than the shadow from a piece of chipboard, like my journaling tag. So I'm going to add shadows that are relative to the items. I'm also going to add shadows that make sense related to color. In other words, the chipboard sitting on top of orange paper will have a different shadow than chipboard sitting on top of green paper. The shadow itself will have an orange hue, or some shade of dark orange leaning towards brown, rather than dark green leaning towards black. Depending on your software, this may or may not be very simple to pull off, but check yours out and see if you can edit the color of the shadow. If you can, click in your color box, click on the background behind the item, then choose a darker shade of that same color.

Can you see the difference? Do you see how the chipboard now REALLY looks like its on top of the photo? And that button is really chunky sitting on top of everything else? You really do have to play with your shadows and customize them for your layouts to pop.

I hope this gave you some new ideas and has you hunting around in your software for shadow options. I would love to hear, and SEE, what you do with this new info! Have a terrific Tuesday!

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