Hi, Sonja here!

As a more artsy designer, I always struggle with combining 2d and 3d elements and creating realistic shadows. I love it when my layouts look “real” in the sense that it could have been done on paper. Shadowing your elements plays an essential role in that.

So today I would like to take you through a layout creation using both 2d and 3d elements. For this layout I used my new Collection Wild & Free and several flowers from my LAD mini Flower Fields.

Let’s get started!

First thing to do (after opening a background paper, of course…) is layering your 2d elements. These are the elements that are made for blending modes and it’s the place to use your brushes!

Shadowing these is easy: you don’t! If you want to create a realistic look, they should look like they were painted/drawn on the background paper. I blended 2 background papers to create a slightly lighter look; the top paper is set to “lighten”. The transfer of the horse is set to “darken” and I recolored the brushes to match the color of the horse.

Don’t worry yet about their placement; we can always move them around, add more or delete some after we added the flowers.

Next, we start layering the flowers. I also added a feather, thread and some buttons. I decided to wait with the shadowing until I was happy with my clustering.

So, if this were a paper layout, I would have glued the flowers in a curved line, following the neckline of the horse, like this:

This means that all the flowers under the line have their shadow going down, and all the flowers above the line have their shadow going up. Also, take into account that flowers and feathers make larger shadows than buttons..

When I was happy with the result I added a word art elements as finishing touch:

To get you started: here’s the transfer I used for my layout. And I’m pretty sure you’ve got loads of flowers “laying around” to dress him up!

Have fun, and if you have questions, let me know!

Hugs, Sonja