Behind the Scenes: Creating Dashed Lines in Photoshop

Stitches always make a good impression on any scrapbooking page. Lots of designers create awesome stitches which they sell in their stores (just check Traci Reed’s sewing line over at sweetshoppedesigns.com, if you don’t know what I’m talking about), but it’s actually not that hard to create similar effects on your own in Photoshop. All you need for starters is a dashed line, and today, I’m going to show you how to create dashed lines in just seconds!

All you need to do is, create a new layer (windows key + shift + n), and then use a brush.

Here’s How It Works

Open your Brush menu. In the Brush palette, choose a default round, hard brush. Now, change the roundness to something like 15%, and the spacing to whatever parameter you prefer (for the stitched line above, I used 650%).

Draw your line. To add more texture to your dashed line, you could add a style, and that’s pretty much it.

Take a look at this P365 layout that I created the other day:

You see that I made a couple of “stitched” pockets, and I used exactly this technique to create the stitching effect. And if you come back next week, I’ll show you exactly how to create little paper pockets like this (including the stitches).

Tip:
Under Shape Dynamics you may want to set the Angle Jitter to “Direction” (which maybe necessary, if your dashed line is curved).

Tags: behind the scenes, scrapbook, tutorial