Trying to Blend In

 

All my life, I have never been one to "blend in" with the crowd. To begin with, I was always tall for my age so I was easy to spot in a crowd. On top of that, I have always favored bold, bright colors for my clothes rather than neutrals. Add to that the fact that I am rather loud and boisterous when I talk, especially when I am enthusiastic about something, and no one can accuse me of hiding on the sidelines!

However, for some time now, I have wanted to do some serious "blending" in my layouts. I checked out a few different tutorials on the subject before attempting my own layouts. Here is what I found:

Julie Mead has a layout with a description of how she blended the car photo into the background of the layout.

Jessica Sprague has a tutorial for fading a photo into the background.

On Hummie's blog you can find a tutorial from Betty Jo on Blending a Photo into Paper.

Misty Cato offers her take on the blending technique. Scroll down to read it.

Monica Larsen offers an excellent tutorial on blending as well, using two different examples.

 

Now I will show you what I came up with for my layouts. The first one, Guitar Heroes, is one I had been waiting to scrap since New Year's Day. Our family was gathered at my brother's for supper and we brought along my daughter's Guitar Hero game for the PS 2 machine. Everyone took a turn playing, even my 82-year-old mother! We had a ball! The blending of the photo of my nephew was achieved by using a color image and setting the blend mode to Vivid Light with an opacity of 75%.

 

Click photo for detailed view and full credits.

 

The second layout, She Don't Know She's Beautiful, is a layout that cried out to me to be scrapped! It is reminiscent of the turmoil that teens go through on their path to adulthood. The blending was achieved by using a monochrome copy of my daughter's photo which I enlarged to 300%. After positioning it on the textured background paper I was using, I set the blend mode to Linear Light at 100% and then used a layer mask to remove the excess photo. I also used blending to place a floral overlay over the background (under my daughter's picture). The blend mode was set to Color Dodge at 50% and I duplicated that layer using the same settings. I also used a layer mask to mask the area where I blended her photo and also under the title so it would show up properly.

 

Click photo for detailed view and full credits.

 

I hope that you will try out some blending yourselves, using some of the resources I have listed for you. I would love to see what you come up with . . . send me a link to your layouts below.