Don’t Put Off ‘till Tomorrow What You Can Doodle Today!

A hot new trend in scrapbooking design is the use of doodles. Designers are incorporating simple drawings into papers and embellishments by turning doodles into brushes and overlays. Scan your favorite doodled designs and create a trendy brush or patterned paper as described above. Wacom makes a wonderful USB drawing tablet (Wacom Graphire4) for under $100 that allows you to draw original digital artwork.

To create a doodle:

Step 1: Open up a .png file in Photoshop Elements. (Note: a .png file is a transparent file, so only your doodle will show, and not the background.) To do this, go to File | New | Blank File from your main menu. This will open up a box that will let you set the parameters for your new file.

You’ll want to set the width and height of your new file (here we’ve chosen 3” by 3”), make sure your Resolution is set to 300 (so you’ll have a high-quality file suitable for printing), the Color Mode to RGB Color (Red-Green-Blue) and your Background Contents to Transparent.

You should now have a blank file filled with a grey/white checkerboard pattern. That pattern indicates that the file is transparent – it will NOT show up when you move your doodle onto a layout or save it as a brush!

Step 2: You’ll want to open up your Brush Tool by either choosing it from the Tools Palette or just typing the letter B on your keyboard (B is the keyboard shortcut for the Brush Tool).

Be sure the Brush Tool is selected on the options bar.

Choose a brush that suits the type of design you’d like to create.
Here we’ve used a hard round brush with a size of 13 pixels.

To choose your brush color, click on the Foreground Color box.
This will bring up the Color Picker box which will allow you to
choose any color for your brush.

Now just use your mouse and doodle away! Here we’ve made a very simple flower.

Step 3: To use this new doodle on your layout, you can simply choose the Move Tool (M) and drag it onto your layout. If you want to save this doodle to use again later, just choose File | Save As and be sure you select .png from the file type.

Here are a few sample pages to help inspire you! In the first layout, the background paper was made with doodles!