Frugal Friday: Photo Editing without the Software - Part 4

Almost every pre-teen girl can remember sitting in Junior High classes, daydreaming and doodling on your paper…circles, stars, cross-hatching and hearts…little dots and dashes and just random strokes…

Let’s get back to this and add it to our scrapbooking repertoire…

We will call this adding texture to your photographs…

Gather up some nice pens, in varying widths, if you have them. I use Pigma Micron pens from Sakura in widths from 005 to 08. I also gathered a few other pens to try…a fine point Sharpie, a white Uni-Ball Signo pen, and a set of colored Zig Writers.


Again, we are going to work on photographs that are less-than-perfect.

Let’s start, on a piece of scratch paper, getting the hang of some basics…we will look at three elements, shape, fill and density.

Shape: This can be anything from circles to stars to the outline of a letter…


Fill: This is where the fun begins; fill in your shape to give it some weight using dots, smaller shapes, lines or random squiggles…


Density: Depending on the overall ‘texture’ you want to achieve, your doodles can be closely spaced and very dense or sporadic and light…


Below is a sample photo where you can see how different pens show up on the picture. I was less than happy with the Sharpie results, Sharpies tend to go grey when used on a slick surface…so don’t use one if you want a nice intense black doodle. In general, rollerball and ball point pens do not really work well on the photos, again because of the slick surface.


Now let’s apply our doodling knowledge to our less-than-perfect photos. In this photo, there is an unwanted dog snout…cute dog, but not what I had in mind for the picture….


I simply used a very dense doodle, using a combination of thick pen width (a black Zig Marker) and a finer detail width ( a black Micron 03). Using a combination of cross-hatching, random circles and asterisks, I effectively blocked out the unwanted snout and added a lot of whimsy to the picture.


I repeated these textures, less densely, on two companion pictures.


Doodling on pictures is also a good way of filling unwanted empty space. In this photo, the focus of the picture are the two sets of feet, but there is too much concrete in the background to make the picture pop…so I added some random circles to fill in the empty space.


Continuing on, I had the doodles travel off of the photo and onto the layout background for cohesion.


And finally, here is a quick layout using my sample tulip photos…


Check out this blog post for instructions on making the faux spray paint background...

So was the experiment worth it? Here is the tally:
Cost: $0
Fun Factor: Extremely fun…and a bit relaxing!
Time: All depends on you and what kind of doodling you want
Skill Level: Basic

So there it is, Fun Photo Textures! Easy Peasy…and Cheap! Cheap!