Travel Scrapbook : Signs as Brushes

One of the best parts of traveling is the planning your adventure. While on vacation, I like to start planning my scrapbook pages. In Spain last month, I was walking around town snapping pictures and wishing I had an AE brush to use on my title card. I mean, I know having her write Platja d’Aro is asking a bit much. But I don’t even have one that says Spain! Yes, I know that I am insane. But it is also the truth.

So, as I am walking along and lamenting the fact that there is a brush I don’t own, I walked under this sign. “Yeah, it would look something like that!” I thought. It took me about half a block for that to register, stop dead in my tracks, and go back to take this picture. First, I thought I would just stick the photo in AS a title card. Then I had a light bulb moment. A stroke of genius, if I do say so myself.

I opened the photo in photo shop, and selected the little wand tool.

Then, I clicked on the word I wanted so that it had the little marching dots around it, and selected copy (Ctrl+C). Because this is a cursive script and all the letters are connected, it selected the whole word at once. You could totally do this with normal fonts, but you would need to choose each letter individually.

After selecting my title card (See the World, of course!) and opening it is photoshop, I simply had to paste (Ctrl +P). It worked! There were the words from my sign!

Next, I recolored the title to bright blue. I recolor everything to bright blue. It is such a beautiful rut. Anyway, for this case I used the eyedropper tool to take the same shade of blue that was already on the card. Then, “Edit” and “Fill layer”.

A quick change of the size, and ta-dah! I have my card that I was daydreaming about!

I have always been a collector of sign photos, snapping pictures of ones that amuse me. In fact, the sign pictures are always the first ones my mom asks to see. Now, I will be looking for signs that I can use as brushes!