Lesson 13 - Fun with Dings

Dings or Dingbats are fonts that are pictures instead of letters. There are some wonderful Dings out there that you can use to create great elements for scrapbooking. You can find many here http://www.searchfreefonts.com/categories/9/ or you may already have some favorites of your own.

Most Windows systems come with a couple already loaded. Take a look at your font list and you will find Wingdings, or Webdings in your list. You can start with those.

Open a new image, 200 x 200 transparent background. Click on the Text Tool

and locate the font of your choice. Using Black as our background (fill) color and null as our foreground color, set your font size to 132 (you will have to type it in) and try one character.

while the marquee is still around we are going to apply a texture to it. Go to Effects / Textures / Soft Plastic and using the settings below apply to our ding.

Next we want to give it a slight bevel. Go to Effects / 3D Effects / Inner Bevel and use these settings.

Deselect (CTRL + D) and we now have our first element.

We can use this to embellish a tag, put it on a ribbon, or set two like this for a corner.

I am sure you can think of other things to do with these. We want to save these elements in a format that we can use over and over again. I suggest that you export them as .png elements or tubes. Most of the commercial digital scrapbook elements you will find are in .png format. Only because it can be used in most graphic software. Now lets try another one.

This time lets use a gradient for our fill color. I am using my gold gradient but you can use almost any gradient you wish. Type a new character in another new image same size, using the gradient fill, then just do a slight bevel and you should get something like this.

This one I want to use as a divider, like this.

Dings can create wonderful effects and you will be surprised with what you can make with a simple ding. Experiment, be creative, but most of all Have Fun!!