Digi Tip April 2011: Using Glue on Digi Scrapping!

What??  The best part about digi scrapping is that there is no adhesive!  Well, at least to me that's one of my favorite parts. I never run out of adhesive, and if I change my mind about where I've placed something on the page, I just click and drag it to a new location, no messy adhesive to un-do.

Sometimes when you are digi-scrapping you wish you could "glue" things together.  So for this months Digi-Tip, I'm going to show you 2 types of "glue" you can use in your digi scrapping.

Just like in traditional scrapping, digi scrapping has both a permanent adhesive and a temporary adhesive. 

I'm using two of the elements in the above layout as my example today. The angel and the wings in the lower right corner.

They are 2 separate elements and therefore 2 separate layers in my Photoshop file.

If you want to "stick" things together, but you don't want to permanently alter them, you can link them in the digi world. To do this, in the layers palette click on one of the layers, then Ctrl+click on the second and any subsequent layers that you want "stuck" together.  Once you have all the appropriate layers selected, click on the chain link to "link" these layers together.  You'll see the chain link show up next to the layer thumbnails in the layers palette. Now if you move, or resize the linked layers, they will all move and resize together.  Even though these layers are linked together, you can still apply styles such as drop shadows to them individually.  You can see in the above sample, the angel (top layer) has a shadow that is cast on the wings (lower layer).

If you need to manipulate just one of those layers, just click on that layer in the layers palette to make that layer active, then click on the chain link and it will un-link that layer. To un-link all of the layers, select them all and then click the chain link.

If you want to permanently "glue" layers together, you can "merge-layers". This will actually combine the selected layers together and make them into one single flattened layer. To do this Ctrl+click to select the appropriate layers in the layers palette.  Then right click and select "Merge Layers" from the drop down menu that opens.  Notice in the above image that there is now just one layer. So you can see now that there is no shadow cast for the angel individually, but rather for the angel AND wings as a flattened layer. You no longer see the shadow of her arms cast on the wings.  If you need to un-do the merge, you can use the Edit>Undo. But once you continue to work with your project, that option will no longer be available for you. This is much more permanent, so really give thought to how you want your final project to appear before you decide to merge layers.

So there you have it, you can make things sticky in digi-scrapping!