Tuesday Tip: Blend Modes

I got off to a bit slower of a start with my blogging this year than I originally intended, but I do have some exciting new posts!

One of the things I am most excited about with my new year of blogging adventures is the Tuesday Tips. These will be little tips or tricks for the most part. There will be in depth tutorials sometimes too though. I have found when I am working on my digital scrapbooking pages I sometimes do a little thing that someone new to scrapbooking digitally might not think of! These will not be every single Tuesday quite yet, but there are a few scheduled so they will be semi-regular!

Today I am going to talk to you about blend modes. A really fun way to add an extra special touch to your pages is playing with blending papers or blending other fun things into your background. I do this A LOT when I want a hit of a pattern on my page but nothing too overwhelming to detract from my photo/story. Check out this fun page of my gorgeous niece Elizabeth. (Full credits found here)

I played around with a lot of different backgrounds before settling on a solid blue. However it was still not quite what I wanted. It was just lacking something. With all my added sparkle and things I felt like my background needed a punch as well. Katie Pertiet over at my favorite Designer Digitals has awesome products like these Monochromatic Overlays No. 5. I put one down on top of my solid background but it totally didn't look right just placed there. 

It doesn't look bad at all. That's the awesome thing about the overlays! You really can just plop them down! It isn't as subtle as I wanted though. I decided to have a play with the blend modes on the overlay layer. You can find your blend modes where my yellow arrow is pointing. Select the layer you want to blend in your layers palette and then click on your blend mode. It is always set to "Normal" by default.

I almost always use "Overlay" or "Soft Light" but those just weren't quite right for this page. The awesome thing is, you can click on each one to see how it looks and then click Ctrl + Z to undo it until you find one you like the best. In the end I used "Color Burn" and I am super duper happy with how it turned out!

So I challenge you to try this on your next page! I do this with papers all the time too! I place a patterned paper on top of a solid and desaturate it (by selecting the patterned paper in my layers palette and clicking Ctrl + Shift + U) and then play with the blend modes to make a more subtle pattern for my pages!