Photoshop in 5 with Theresa: Photoshop to Silhouette Hybrid Process

Hi friends, Theresa here with a fun Photoshop In Five tutorial and process video for you! Lately I have been thinking about how I want to document my life going into 2023 and how my scrapbooking can align best with how I am scrapbooking right now. In the past I did Project Life and loved how that allowed me to create pages about our family life with four kiddos, but they are now so grown up and I am looking to simply document my own life now. Of course, the kids will still be in my albums, and I am still excited to document all the fun stories that happen as the year goes on, but it will not be in a weekly or monthly format. I also am just loving the 6x8 album size with hybrid layouts using both Photoshop and my Silhouette together!

So for today I wanted to create my first layout for 2023, and I was super inspired by the Filled With Intention digital collection! This collection is perfect for starting off a new year of documenting with some affirmations, commitments, and I am using it to share some of the thoughts I want to keep in my mind this year and beyond. In particular, these fun speech bubbles looked like a great shape to repeat across the page using some of the patterned papers and journal cards in the kit.

The first thing I did was open up Photoshop and set up a 14”w x 8.5”h blank canvas, bringing in guidelines for the center and the gutter, where the holes will be punched. I then laid out the repeated speech bubbles across the layout. Here is the step by step for adding the photos or patterned papers to that shape:

  1. Bring in the speech bubble embellishment from the kit itself. There are two, one is pointing upward and the other points downward.

  2. Add a black fill layer over top of the bubble and then right click on the layer to create a clipping mask.

  3. Add your papers or photos or cards, size them to scale, and clip them to the black shape.

  4. Flatten your speech bubble or make it into a Smart Object in the Layers menu, so that it is easier

    to move around your page.

  5. Do that as often as you like and lay them out onto your page.

  6. Save your speech bubbles as a JPG and bring them into Silhouette to print and cut!

Of course, the layout needed more lovely stickers and embellishments from the kit, so I printed some of them onto vellum and also onto just regular photo paper, and had the Silhouette cut them out for me. The word strips and vellum butterflies made for the best embellishment clusters! Also notice how I added a few digital stamps directly onto the background papers. Those stamps make great home bases for all the dimensional elements. I also left a bit of space at the bottom for the Growth title word, and used the line digital stamps to create a home for the date stamp.

One last thing was a home for my journaling. I wanted to include some bullet journaling of reminders for the New Year, especially addressing some of the concerns and hesitations I have about starting another year of uncertainty! I brought in a travelers notebook signature and placed it onto the right hand side of the layout, just so that about half of it shows. This was perfect for writing out these worries and coming to terms with it.

I have two videos for you! The first one is a tutorial for creating the speech bubbles.

My second video is the hybrid process video for how I put the layout together once everything was printed out and ready to go.

Thanks so much for joining me today! I hope this gives you some things to think about as you make your own plans for the New Year, and I hope it is a great year for all of us. See you again soon!

~Theresa

TRD Products Used in this Post