POSTED: Nov 11 | Tutorial : Coloring Elements with a Gradient

Hello & welcome to our Tutorial for November! Here in New York, we've had some really blustery, windy days lately. From my office window, I am watching the beautiful autumn leaves fall and blow away. Soon there will be nothing to look at but brown grass and bare branches. After enjoying months of summer's vibrant colors and autumn's rich jewel hues, November leaves me nostalgic for color! So, if I can't see it outside, I am determined to create some color inside ... with Photoshop! I hope you'll consider playing along and creating some colorful pieces of digital art with me.

I have Photoshop CC open, but this can be done in PSE too. I am using a lovely piece of white stitched word art created by Mirjam of Pink Reptile Designs. My PS document also has a paper made by Mirjam too. Under the stitched word art, I pulled in some gesso from the Under the Weather Collab. (You can use any brush you like!)



I want to make this piece of stitching really vibrant and colorful, so I am going to use a gradient. As you can see in my screenshot below, you need to click on the half white, half black circle at the bottom of your layers palette & select Gradient from the drop down box.



Once you do that, you are now ready to select the look of your gradient. If your foreground and background colors are set to the default black and white ... your gradient will probably default to something like this image below. Simply click on the gradient to edit.



Now you are ready to create an awesome gradient in any colors you can imagine. Or simply choose one of the many gradients that are already available to you. I choose the transparent rainbow.



Once you have the look and colors set, click OK. Next you want set the type of gradient. I decided to go with radial, as you can see in my example below. You also need to scale the gradient so that it fits the element or object which you are trying to color. I set mine to 86% and it covered the stitching perfectly.



Now you just need to clip the gradient to your object. In my case it is the word art stitching. In your layers palette, use Alt or (Option on a Mac) Click, while hovering over the space between the gradient and the word art stitches (or your object) to clip the gradient to the word art stitches. That's all there is to it. Look how vibrant and colorful those stitches look now!



You can do this with just about any element or brush. Here's how the Under the Weather gesso looks with a splash of color added via a gradient. (Note: I turned off the gradient for the stitches, so you can see the gradient clipped to the brush a bit better.)



If you decide to play with coloring your brushes and elements with gradients, we'd love it if you share your pages with us! Link us up to what you create!

And if you enjoyed this tutorial and are coveting that awesome Stitched Word Art, make sure you come back on the 15th for our November Challenge. Hint Hint ... there just may be a little something special waiting for you! Until then, there's still time to play in the October Monthly Challenge.

AWESOME!

As i promised, i am writing something to translate this technique for GIMP user :)
It's not very different from photoshop in fact but we have less option in GIMP ..... grrrr
Hope it's ok. I am inspired by the way of presenting of Jen to make it homogeneous

When i say this technique, i'm just saying .... i need to try this right away. The problem is i don't use photoshop but GIMP.
And like many things, there needs some adjustment to do the same thing on GIMP.
By cons, my software is in french .... I tried to find the English words but I can't guarantee that it will be those used in your version :)

I am starting with the same word art and paper than Jen.
I am just adding a layer above my word art and i will work on this layer to add my color.
I am selecting the tool gradient.

We have some option here
You can choose the gradient color among those are available in the software and change the orientation

Up to this step, the gradient is not yet visible in the layout.
So to create this gradient and the lenght of this one, you need to trace this oneon the layer above the word art. the length you trace wil be the length of the radius if you choose the radiale shape. You can find the goo radius for your word art by experiencing

Now we optain a gradient above your word art. Something like this

Now you just need to adjust the gradient to your word art. In your word art layers, slect the pixel by use right click in the layer and select Alpha selection in the option.

Then select your gradient layer, inverse the selection by ctr+I and remove the selection.
The final step is to change the layer mode of the word art from normal to screen

And now you obtain the wonderful word art.
I hope it will be useful and that it will prevent you from looking how to made lol

AWESOME Hélène. I will add this to the post this evening! I have to go to work now!

love your write-up helene. so useful for non PS/PSE users. THANK YOU!!!!

This is so awesome! Thank you so much for teaching me something very valuable. I really need to start learning more about how PSE can help my scrapbook pages rock like the rest of the PRD team's pages do! I need to force myself to make the time! The possibilities are endless, so I guess I let that overwhelm me so I end up going back to paper scrapping using digital products. But I would really love to scrap without having to get out all my supplies if I don't want to

candi1973 wrote:

This is so awesome!  Thank you so much for teaching me something very valuable.  I really need to start learning more about how PSE can help my scrapbook pages rock like the rest of the PRD team's pages do!  I need to force myself to make the time!  The possibilities are endless, so I guess I let that overwhelm me so I end up going back to paper scrapping using digital products.  But I would really love to scrap without having to get out all my supplies if I don't want to

glad to hear you liked the tut candice and learned something new! if there's anything you want to know how to do ... please ask! maybe it could be our next tutorial idea!? i'm always looking for ideas ... this goes for anyone here!