Making Your Own Styles

 

Hello!  CTM Robin here with another quick tutorial.  Today I’m going to show you how to save any effect as your own style to help you speed up your workflow.  Let me just jump in and show you what I mean.  Here is my original layout:

What I want to do is create a double stroke around my “S’MORES” title.  Of course it doesn’t take but a second, but if I create my own style, then it’s a matter of pressing ONE button rather than several the next time I want to do the same thing. So first, I’ll add the inner black stroke.  See it?

Then, I’ll add my second, red stroke:

Now you can add one or two or even more strokes on your layers.  Also, be sure to play around with the size, position, opacity, color, and even blend modes.  You make the adjustments which you like!  And then, the fun begins! 

In the layers panel, make sure you have selected the title or whatever you have used your strokes on.  Then go under the Styles panel to that plus sign in the middle of the bottom (if you don’t have your styles panel docked like I do, you can go Windows>Styles to pop the panel up):

Click on it and a dialogue panel will pop up looking like this:

Go ahead and name your new style to whatever you want.  I called mine “Double Outline” (not very creative, but it gets the point across!)  You should see it now listed in your Styles panel:

What I really like about creating my own styles is that I can simply add this effect to anything else with one button.  For instance, I’ll add a double stroke around my word art just to show you what I mean:

Want to know the best part??  These styles are fully adjustable!  All I have to do is select on the “fx” button on my layer, and the dialogue box pops up where I can adjust the strokes, shadows, or anything else.  Here I can change the color to green for example:

Now obviously I don’t really want to add a stroke or double stroke to my word art (especially not a green one!) so I’ll step back a bit.  This is my final layout using Liz’s Focal Point Templates 7 template set:

Remember, you don’t have to limit yourself to just strokes.  You can add a pattern, a shadow, a blending mode, or anything else you want to, and then create a new style with those options.  It’s quick, easy, fully adjustable and oh so fun to do.  Try it and let me know what you think!

Merry Christmas and see you next month!

Robin