Good morning everyone!! Tamara here back on this already extremely warm Monday morning! We are in full, summer swing at our house, and busier than ever! I thought for sure that once summer rolled around, that it would slow down a bit…but alas..I believe it sped up!!

Anyway, this week, when I was scrapping with Mye’s new Gotta Grab It Kit called Lazy Summer, I noticed that she included an element that was a sketched rose bush.  Now I don’t know about you, but the first time I encountered an element like this I thought to myself “when will I ever use that?  The kit is yellow and green(in this instance) and the element is black!” In fact, for the longest time I just avoided them all together, but several months ago I realized that this little element has a ton of possibilities! You can turn it into a brush, you can change the blending mode and opacity to “blend” it into the background paper OR, and this is the lesson for the day, you can paint it and give it a WHOLE NEW look!  This tutorial works with both Photoshop AND Photoshop Elements!

To begin, open up the element that you want to recolor and a background paper of your choice. I am going to use Mye’s rose bush element from her Lazy Summer kit and a cream paper from the same kit.  Once you have the two elements open, add the element to the paper.

Once you add the element, you will need to change the blending mode. I usually always start with Color Burn because I like the way it looks, but you can try them all out once we have painted the element.

Next, lock the transparent pixels by clicking on the LOCK icon. It is the icon that looks like a blank square. Locking the pixels will make recoloring a WHOLE LOT EASIER!!

Select a soft, medium sized brush. (keyboard shortcut B) You want to be able to paint in small areas as well as larger areas so choose an appropriate size brush. Once you have the brush size selected, choose the color that you want to “paint” your element by clicking on the foreground color box (the top box). A Color Picker dialogue box will appear and you can select the color that you want to use to begin your painting. I selected a medium green. Click OK to set the color.

Now, with your element layer selected in the layers palette, and your brush selected in your tools palette, color on the element.You can change the opacity of the brush at the top of your workstation in the Options Panel to control the amount of color you add to your element and you can change the color of your brush to add depth to the element.

Above, I added a darker shade of green to the different spots on the leaf to emphasis the shadows. The great thing is that if you paint a part of the element that you didn’t want to paint, you can just pick the correct color and paint it again or paint it with black to start all over! This is your chance to be creative! You can add several colors or make it simple and only add one color! The choice is YOURS!!!

Here is my finished rose. I am perfectly ok with it not being colored “in the lines” mostly because I have sketched before and water colored over the sketch and I know that that the color bleeds a little, but you can make it as perfect or imperfect as you like..the point is that this is a special artistic piece that you will add to your layout or hybrid projects, so you can be original!

Once you are finished painting, you can add the element to your page “as is” or you can try different looks by changing the blending mode of the element layer in the Layers Palette.

In the example below, I painted the element a solid green and changed the blending mode to Linear Burn to give it a more vintage look. LOVE this look for a vintage card!

In my layout below, I matched the color green to the layout by using my color picker tool and then selected a darker shade of that green by sliding the color picker straight down to choose a  darker green color in the same color family. I painted the rose bush green and then changed the blending mode to Color Burn. I then added a few copies of the rose bushes behind my elements but on top of the paint so that they are just peeking out from under the leaves and flowers to make it look a little fuller and to allow for a better flow on my layout.

 …and that is it, a quick and EASY way to spice up your layouts by adding a custom colored element!!  I hope you enjoyed the tutorial today. I know I use this concept A LOT in my layouts so I hope you find it useful as I do!  You can use it for ANY transparent item or rub on element and I probably use it the most on elements like paint splats! Th possibilities are endless, just make sure that you LOCK the transparent pixels before you begin to paint!

Happy painting!

Tamara