Hi, Silke here.

We are in the flower season, and these elements are the favorites to use in our layouts.

Today we’re going to talk about long-stemmed flowers.

The shadow is a fundamental part of the layout to give depth (3D) and realism to the digital scrapbooking pages. We also have designers and scrappers who create very artistic 2D pages, focused on art journaling, and do not use shadows in their compositions. But this is a different matter and it’s for another time.

As a sample for you, to get the idea of a long stemmed flower or a branch with realistic shadow, I went out to my garden and picked a flower and a branch. Then I laid these items on a paper and took this picture with my iPhone using natural light coming into my window. This is the shadow effect that we will imitate from real life here in the digital composition!

Today you will learn how to shadow in a realistic way long-stemmed flowers:

  • Add Layer Styles
  • Create a separate layer for the shadows
  • Wrap the Shadow with the Wrap Tool

Start by open in your Photoshop a new document, 3600x3600x300dpi. Make the Background white in order to see the shadows with better precision. For this exercise add 3 long stem flowers in separate layers above the white background.

– Add Layer Styles

Set the layer style for the first flower like follow:

Now stay on this layer and, holding down the ctrl key, with the right mouse button, hit on this layer (this will open the floating menu) and then choose “Copy Layer Style”

Then select the two other layers (hold down ctrl key and select both). With the right mouse button, hit on this layer (this will open the floating menu) and then choose “Paste Layer Style”

– Create a separate layer for the shadows

Click on the layer style icon – fx – with the right mouse button and then choose “Create Layer”.

Make this also for the next 2 flower layers.

– Wrap the Shadow

Click on the first flower shadow layer then go to Menu> Edit> Transform> Wrap

– The WRAP TOOL

Click and drag along any point or line of the grid to distort and wrap the shadow. This will give a realist look to the flower shadow!

Depending on the background, you can change the opacity of the shadow – make it lighter or harder.

Here is my page with the 3 long stemmed flowers using the Flower Fields LAD mega kit:

Our next LAD – Flower Fields kicks off in the forum on April 7! It’s free & fun – come and play with us?