Day: April 19, 2011

Behind the Scenes: Creating a Digital Design Tray

It’s time for our monthly Photoshop tutorial, and I thought, today I’d like to take you to the world of Bevel & Embossing. In other words, I’m going to show how you can create a design tray similar to the one I did just the other day. SSD has a challenge this month, for which they used a really cute design tray as inspiration, and I loved the image so much, that I wanted to try my hands on this kind of design. The problem: I don’t have any such design tray – neither in my digiscrap stash, nor a physical one at home. But I had an idea of how I could achieve a somewhat similar look digitally, and here is what I did: 1. Create a blocked background I started by creating a blocked background with the Rectangle Tool on my blank canvas. After filling the whole canvas with blocks of various sizes, I selected all the layers in the Layers Panel, and duplicated everything. The duplicated layers I merged into one layer; …

Places to Go: Tomb of Qin Shi Huang (Xi’An)

Great myths surround the death and burial of  Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. Legend has it that the emperor -afraid of death, and wanting to preserve is life forever – went through great measures to ensure his afterlife was well established and protected. The famed Terracotta Army – next to the Great Wall, maybe the most remarkable historical attraction in China – is also credited to Qin Shi Huang, as is his legendary tomb. Tales of palaces and scenic towers, of rivers made with mercury, jewels and immeasurable riches being buried together with the emperor have circulated for centuries. Due to the lack of appropriate technology which can preserve the hidden treasures, the tomb has yet to be opened. But there is a replica of the tomb in close proximity to the actual site, and visitors can get an impression of what is awaiting future archeologists and historians in the real tombs of Qin Shi Huang.