Weaving is a fun and fairly easy to accomplish digital scrapbooking technique. It is the practice of making a group of elements look as though they are intertwined with one another. It also adds a little more interest to the 3 dimensional look of the page.

The below layout could be left as is with it looking as though the string had been placed on top of the wordart and under the floating heart. However, I like to give the layout a little more dimension by weaving the string with the wordart and heart. I think it helps to make them appear to be a single group rather than 3 individual elements simply layered on top of one another.

To begin the weaving, we are going to put the drop shadow for the string onto its own layer. To do this, right click your layer palette. Choose the Create Layer option as shown below. (Be sure to right click on the Effects section of the layer palette for the string layer and not on the layer name section or you won’t get the Create Layer option)

If we didn’t put the drop shadow for the string on its own layer, when we erase parts of the string, Photoshop would put the drop shadow along all of the edges of the string. This would create drop shadows over the wordart when the string is supposed to look as though it is behind the wordart in those places.

Now that the drop shadow is on its own layer, we will select the wordart so that we get marching ants around it (Control-Click or Command-Click on a Mac the layer palette image of the wordart layer to get the marching ants).

Once the wordart is highlighted with the marching ants, click on the string layer as shown below. We are going to do our erasing on the string layer but want the eraser to be confined by the wordart shaping.

Now select the eraser tool from your tool palette. You will want to choose a hard edged brush as we want nice clean edges when we erase. The size of brush you pick will depend on the size of your element that you are weaving and whether you have large or small areas to erase.

Erase the parts of your element that you want to appear behind the other element. In this case, we are going to erase the parts of the string that we want to appear under the wordart instead of resting on top of it.

You will notice below that even though you have erased those parts of the string, the string drop shadow still appears. Therefore, once you have erased the parts on the string layer, click on the drop shadow layer and repeat erasing the same parts of the string drop shadow layer.

I find that you achieve the most realistic weaving look if you follow a habit of having your string go under and then over and then under like you would if you were doing basket weaving. However, adjust what you choose to appear under or over based on your particular items and their shaping.

For this string and wordart combination, I choose to have it go under at the bottom and top of the ‘y’ because I wanted it to go over in the ‘y’ in the middle as the string appeared to have a natural flow of it that would be shaping over something if it were a real piece of string. I find it helpful if I think through how I think the element would naturally flow over the other element if they were physically in front of me. Then when I am erasing I can think, ‘over – leave, under – erase’.

Again, I could have stopped there but I decided to continue by weaving the heart with the string as well.

Because the heart has a built in crease to it, I positioned it over the string so that it appeared to be creased over the string. Therefore, I decided I would weave it by having the string go over the right top side of the heart.

Again, I put the heart’s drop shadow onto its own layer.

This time, however, I selected the string to have the marching ants around it as I wanted to cut a piece of the heart away so it would appear that piece of the heart was under the string.

An easy habit to get into is to put the marching ants around the element which is the bottom item in the layers palette and have your active layer the element which is on top. That way, you know to always erase what you want to appear to be below. You can do it the other way around and erase the parts that you want to appear on top as well if you find that easier for your mind to process.

Now that I had the string selected and had the heart layer set as my active layer, I erased the piece of the heart that I wanted to appear beneath the string. Once that was erased, I switched my active layer to the heart’s drop shadow layer and erased the same area.

The final result was a wordart, string and heart which appear to be intertwined with one another.

It is that simple to weave your elements together. I hope you will try it out. It can become very fun and addicting.

Audrey Neal: Lovestruck Word Art, Lovestruck Paper Pack, Lovestruck Elements
Carina Gardner Essentials – Stitches V.1
Tiffany Tillman Scrappable Collection Nine

Related posts

• Tutorial – Warping Shadows
• Tutorial: How to Use Digital Templates to Create a Desktop Background
• Tutorial: Blending Photos into a Background
• Tutorial – Type Tips
• Top in the Shop

Tags: Design House Decorators, Heather Guenther, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Weaving, Tutorials