Discovering Photoshop

Over the last couple of weeks I have started to think about branding for my future handmade business. I realised that in order to have a professional looking market stall I would probably need to have tags on my bags and purses, a poster or sign to put up, some business cards to hand out and perhaps somewhere for people to go if they would like to shop online.

To tie all this together I decided I needed a logo and some theming ideas. I had a good think about the kinds of things that represent me, my loves and my crafts and came up with some broad ideas to incorporate in some way, things like polka dots, cats, cute/kawaii things, vintage etc.

I looked into having a logo designed by a professional and unfortunately it was a little out of my price range at this point in time, so I decided to look into making one myself.

Enter the major epiphany that lo and behold, at my very fingertips resides a computer program to meet all the needs of an amaetur logo designer- Photoshop. My husband uses it almost daily for his photography and it occured to me if he can have multiple layers for photos, surely I could use it for patterns frames and text?

My ignorance of the power of Photoshop became apparent when I discovered an amazing website called Pugly Pixel. It's creator Katrina has to be one of the most generous, talented and quirky artists I have come across and her website hosts a huge collection of free (and premium) files of digital backgrounds, papers, tapes, ribbons and more for people to use on their blogs, websites and for arts and crafts. Amazing!

Katrina has also put together a series of tutorials showing you how to make your own backgrounds, borders and patterns using Photoshop. I had no previous experience using Photoshop and was able to follow the tutorials really easily. I'd recommend them for anyone who would like to make their own digital stationary to pretty up their blogs and websites. Fun!

After fiddling around with a few techniques I put some of them together to make something resembling a little business card. My husband fixed it up for me, flattened it and saved it as a jpeg so I can share it with you here:

first Photoshop baby

I don't think it is something I would use, but it was definitely fun to make and to play around with. Not bad for a first go! I'm pretty excited about learning some new skills and I think it could open up a whole range of possibilities.

I can't wait to learn more!
xx