Creating a scrapbook page

This morning I was on a template kick.  One of my other projects is a library of Photoshop templates and it had been a while since I put up anything new so I spent a few hours in Photoshop hacking together some new designs.  Figured it would make a good post here as well

The goal
I wanted something with fabric texture overlaid splotchy, pastel colors.  Rather than try to explain with words, here's what the final template looks like.



Starting up
First step was to get our canvas setup.  It's a 10 inch by 10 inch image at 300dpi. 



I found the colors on kuler.adobe.com by searching for pastels.  These colors were the 2nd or 3rd that came up.



Drawing the splotches
The background was just sort of a random filling in of color. I took the airbrush tool set to about 300 pixels and filled in the different colors.  And I didn't worry too much about leaving white space.  That would be taken care of in the next step.

Next up was the fabric texture.  I found one I liked at LostAndTaken.com.

The original texture was about 8.5x11 so I resized it to 10x10.  It was also too dark so a little levels adjustment along with desaturating and it was ready.  Copied it on a new layer above what I had already done and switched the layer type to multiply.  Opacity to about 20% and it was ready.



All that's left is the opening for an image.  The image layer is set to have an outer glow so it looks like it's sitting a bit off the fabric.



And we're left with this.



Downloading?
If you're interested, you can download the completed PSD at TikiTemplates.com