This is the tag we'll be making and what you'll need:

• Family scrapkit made by the very talented Melissa who has it available on her blog for free. If you choose to download this kit, please 'leave some love' on her 4shared in appreciation, it's what helps keep these freebies free lol.

• Tube I used was by Jamie Kidd and is available for purchase at CILM, but any tube will do also.

• Filters I used were Sinfinity (a free Filter Factory plugin in pack R) and Eye Candy 4000 Gradient Glow on the text.

• Font used was Pen Tip, not sure if it's pay or not, but any font of your choosing will work.



Okay ready, let's go!

1. Open up a blank canvas with a white background. I chose to use a starting size of 500 x 500.

2. Open up the scrap bits you wish to use. I then re-size the DPI on them, as it's important that if you are using PTU tubes, you may not exceed 72 DPI. I tend to re-size each item before putting on my tag, so I don't need to worry about it later. If you do not know how to re-size the resolution, check on my tips and tricks board and you'll see an easy peasy way to do that.

3. Take the paper accent circle if you are using the same kit I did. I didn't need to re-size but depends on your canvas size. Using your magic wand tool, click inside the frame and expand by about 5 and then invert your selection.

4. Paste paper 3 as a new layer below your frame and then hit delete so that all you see is the circle filled in the frame nicely.

5. Now go back up to your frame layer and duplicate it and then bring that layer below the paper layer you just added. Re-size this duplicated copy by 105% (this layer only, not entire tag.

6. Okay now apply a gaussian blur to that copy, I had mine at a blur of 20. Apply the Sinfinity filter setting, just use the default or personalize the settings if you choose.

7. Now that gives it a yellow color and that isn't the color I want for the background of my tag lol. So go to colorize (Adjust, Hue & Saturation, Colorize). I colorized to 193 and 40 which gave it a pretty purple color. Go ahead and colorize the other layers to make them nice and matching.

8. Now we want to place a tube in there. On the frame layer, using your magic wand, click in the middle and invert selection. Paste your tube as a new layer on top of the frame. Grab your eraser tool and erase the bottom part of the tube sticking over the frame. I just erased on the bottom to make the top look like it was sticking through. After you've erased what you want, select none.

9. You may notice just a smidge of white space. The way I fixed mine was take my mover tool and just click on it, but don't actually move yet. Using the arrow keys on your keyboard move it one pixel at a time. I did mine that way so it literally just snaps it into place as I want. When happy, that's it for the tube.

10. Re-size your tag to the size that you prefer most if you started with a bigger canvas. At this point, I'd also sharpen each layer. That just keeps things clear so colors don't bleed so much.

11. Add your copyright and watermark, making sure that the copyright information is clearly visible at first glance.

12. Now it's time to add your text, I chose to use Pen Tip on this one. I chose a color from the frame, #9e85b3. Then I applied an Inner Bevel setting, followed by Eye Candy 4000 Gradient Glow setting. My setting I used as just the 'Fat" setting. On the first panel, it's 3, 0, 100 and on the second panel, just choose your color, and for this tag, I chose #ddd7e2. Apply a drop shadow of your choice. I like mine to be subtle, so I used 0, 0, 50, 5 and #6b3bcb.

13. I chose to hide the white background layer and then save as a png file and that's it voila! I hope you found this very easy to do and I didn't confuse you too much along the way.



This tutorial was written by Tonya on December 25, 2008 and absolutely no part of this tutorial may be taken or used without my express permission.