Deck the Halls with Subway Art

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Hi everyone!  It’s Jenelle here with a fun inspiration post that will have you decorating your house all year round!  Subway Art is very popular right now and lots of fun to create!  You can make Subway Art based around any theme – seasons, holidays, family, special occasions.  Today though, I’m going to ‘deck the halls’ with some Christmas art.

Subway Art uses words, a variety of fonts and sometimes pictures to create a visually appealing art work – to either frame and display in your home/office or to transfer onto scrapbook layouts, cards, hybrid projects etc.  Using brushes, stamps, fonts, word art and other digital scrapbooking supplies, you too can create your very own Christmas artwork to frame for yourself or give as a gift.

 I’ll talk you through how I made mine, but first, here’s a close up of the actual document I created in Photoshop and then printed at home on my old printer (who says you need all the fancy gear!)

•  First up, I opened a new document in Photoshop (I use CS2 on a PC) and I set the dimensions to 10×13 inches, 300dpi and set the background to white (it’s better to start off large and reduce down, so if you change your mind later, you won’t lose image quality when trying to enlarge your document).  In the end, I printed mine at 8×10 inches as I had a spare frame at home that size!
•  Next, I opened up my stash of Shabby Shoppe goodies and browsed through all the Christmas-themed kits.  I then chose some stamps and word-art from both the Sugarplum Dreams, Sugar Plum Additions and Believe kits in the Shoppe.  Here’s some word art examples that got my creativity flowing:-

• Then it was a simple process of dragging the word art onto my document and playing around with size, colour and placement of the text. 
• Next, I came up with a list of words based around a Christmas theme, typed them in as separate text layers and changed the font style, size and colour of each of these words to fit in with the word art already placed on the document.

I think most of the fonts I’ve used are free fonts I’ve found on the net, some are even doodles/dingbats.  I’ll list them all over on my page in the Shabby Artist Gallery.  Basically, I just had fun playing around with some of my favourite fonts.  I changed their size, spacing, turned them to faux bold, faux italic, added a thin stroke line or even made some words all uppercase to come up with a design that was visually appealing to me.  You might even choose to use a coloured background with white writing, or even use a favourite paper as your background.  There really are no rules and no limits to where your creativity can take you!

Quick Tip:- I found it very handy to use Guides in Photoshop when I was initially positioning my word art and text.  They gave me a neat edge for the words to line up against, kind of like a floating border.  The guide lines don’t print so you don’t have to remember to erase them either.  For more info on guides and how to set them up click here.

Turning on the Smart Guides was another trick that helped me position words so they lined up neatly on the document.  Smart Guides are a very handy tool for quickly lining up objects on a page, without having to use rulers, grids or create ruler guides.  ( To turn Smart Guides on, go to View > Show > Smart Guides and check the box. Once they are turned on, they will automatically show when you are lining up layers on your Photoshop document. Smart Guides display as pink lines when the top, middle and bottom of objects align).

•  So, when you are done playing and you’re happy with your artwork, flatten your image and save it as a jpg then print it – either at home or with your preferred print shop. (I always keep my psd file too, just incase I want to make changes later or even re-do my artwork).
• Pop your print into a frame or even glue it to a canvas for display – then you’re done!  What a great gift for any time of the year. 

I’m even thinking about making one for my son’s teacher as a thank you gift at Christmas (our end of school year here in Australia).  I’ll possibly use her name along with the children’s names in her class and some other words about being a wonderful teacher (and of course an apple and other school elements for effect…hmm… thinking I’ll need the Hopscotch School Additions for this!!) Ok, my mind is racing here, back on topic now Jenelle!

Remember, you can always reduce your image size to print your artwork on cards or other hybrid projects (t-shirts, coasters, place mats, wall plaques) or even drop and drag it over onto one of your scrapbook layouts.  So many uses for your design and you can change them up with every season!

Well, that’s all from me today.  I do hope you’ve enjoyed reading my post and it inspires you to play around with some of your favourite fonts and Shabby Shoppe stamps, brushes and word art to create your very own piece of Subway Art.  We’d love to see your creations our gallery.

Be sure to join us here again tomorrow when Anna shares a very helpful tip or two in her Shoppe Tips & Tricks post.

Happy Scrapping everyone!

JenelleHybrid Projects, Inspiration, Uncategorized 6 Comments