While taking Jessica Sprague's class The Art of Digital Design I realized that I really like making digital background papers more that elements for pages. I make my own background papers whenever I am creating a page layout. My backgrounds are tailored to what I think the background should be for the page and its contents. I really need to see what is to go on a page before I start to create in my mind's eye what the background paper will be. However, I create a lot of papers that never go anywhere except into the trash. However, I realize that many people buy their papers and sometimes have trouble finding just what they want that is for sale. Fortunately, there are many places with many designers that are creating almost anything you can think of that you need. One of my purposes with my blog is to show you what you can do with Adobe Photoshop CS4 to help you create just the background paper that you might need that you can't find anywhere.
When I was writing Other Days With Earl Episodes 2 and 3, Argyle Designing Parts 1 and 2, my mind would wander and think about other things to do with what I was doing for argyles. That is when I thought about what I could do with circles, or dots. So I started playing around with the pattern for the argyle with the circles instead of the diamonds or squares. This playing around led me to what I call my Bold Dots.
I start out with a similar design for an argyle using circles. You can download my .pdf files on how to make the argyle patterns from previous entries to my blog.

But, now instead of coloring the circles different colors to make up the colored argyle pattern, I cut out the circles leaving hole through which you see behind the pattern. I used this to create the pattern. And I go from there. Imagination is fun!

Here are a couple of samples that I have made.


A 5-petal flower brush that I created was used and also various layer blending modes. Also, the Behind and Clear Painting Modes for the Brush Tool were used. If you haven't used these before they can be very useful and fun to use.
For your enjoyment, at least I hope so, you can download for your use 10 different papers that I created for you. These are freebies for you to have and use; the only restriction is your own good common sense in what you use them for. In addition, if you have Photoshop CS4 (or similar) you can also download another file that contains the two .psd files that were used in the creation of these papers and the .pat pattern files that you can load into your patterns to use. The downloads are through 4shared.
The papers are all 12 x 12-inch, 300 ppi, .jpg format.
To download the 10 freebie papers, Click Here.To download the .psd and pattern files, Click Here.The downloads are .zip files. You will have to unzip them to use what is inside the .zip files.
I am in the process of writing Other Days with Earl Episode 4 Bold Dots. It will be in a .pdf format and available for you to download soon. I will post a blog entry when it is available.
I hope that you are enjoying these ramblings with me, Earl. If you are, I would appreciate your leaving a comment so that I know someone is looking at it.
Enjoy!