Making Scrapbooking Elements With Letters

You can make amazingly beautiful and quite easy elements to embellish your scrapbooking using letters. Here's a quick tutorial to make one.


This tutorial assumes you have Inkscape and Gimp installed on your computer.
It also assumes that you have at least an elementary understanding of both programs.

♦ Choose the Text tool and Using the font called Euphemia, size 144, write the letter X in caps.
Repeat it 5 times on the same line. Then, on another part of the canvas, write a single capital X.
♦ Copy and paste it twice more, then drag and position it under the other 5, skipping the first and last Xs.
♦ On the following row, make only 1 X in the middle. Now select all the Xs by stroking with your mouse over all of them to create a selection. Then go to Object, Group.
♦Now that they are all in a block, copy and paste 5 more of them. Select the ellipse tool and draw a medium-sized circle. Fill it iwth the color of your choice, I've chosen a pallet named Ubuntu and I'm using the Accent Red Base color, but you can pick anything you like. Fill your circle with the chosen color, also, color your Xs with it as well.
♦ Now, you must position your X blocks around that circle. Drag your circle and place it right under the first block of Xs, then, click on the next block you want to drag, and click again, you'll notice that arrows form all around it, these arrows will allow you to turn the piece around, so, guiding yourself by the finished image, turn the block of Xs around a little bit to fit the space on the side of the circle, drag and fit into that space, letting the ends of the Xs interlock.
♦ Repeat this process all around. You will have a piece that looks like this:

► Note- Make sure that where your Xs meet, they interlock smoothly, it will take a little bit of tweaking, but you can do it easily by moving the ends and adjusting until you're happy with the result. Not all the Xs will match all the time, but your goal is to at least make the outer edges match smoothly for a more
pleasing look.
♦ You can stop there, but I wanted something a bit more festive. Select all your element, copy it. Close Inkscake and open Gimp.
♦ Paste it in Gimp. Choose the Ellipse tool and make a circle inside the red circle you brought from Inkscape. Choose the Blend Tool and fill with a linear blend, (I picked Golden), then go to Select, Shrink, and shrink by 30 pixels. Go to Layer, New Layer.
♦ Change your Foreground color to f60d0d, and make sure your Background color is White. Now change the Blend to FG to BG (RGB) and stroke downward, also using a linear blend. Now click on Select None.
This is what your element will look like at this point:

♦ You can leave it like that, or you can apply one more little touch.
♦ Go to Filters, Light and Shadow, Supernova, and make sure to click with your mouse where you want the flare to go on the top of your circle. Choose a pale yellow for the color, which will be like a reflection of the gold, I used color e2ff59.
♦ Leave all the regular settings intact. Click OK to create your supernova.
♦ Once the effect has been completed, save the finished element as a png to incorporate it into any scrapbooking project of your choice. It will look like this:

These blocks of Xs can be used in a variety of ways to create flowers, crosses, and other elements also. Just play around with this and see how many of your own elements you can create! Have fun!


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