Okay, note cards/recipe cards are so easy. It seems strange to write a tutorial for them, because there are so many ways to do them. It's really up to you'r own imagination and ideas. This is simply the method I've been using lately for pretty faded designs.

You will need Paint Shop Pro,
seamless fills, a texturiser filter like Eyecandy 3.1, or Paint Engine work well,
Well.. pretty much a background. Or an image.. this method works easily well with any of them.
This pattern, (download here), unzip it to your patterns folder.
If you don't have any of the filters above, I've included a few blank cards in grey scale you can colorise to match the tube you use.
You will need to increase color depth to 16 million colors to use them.
Download those here.(182k, 7 notecard backgrounds)
Oh yeah! Pretty tubes you want to use for decoration!

(this tutorial is written for the ladies at aputercraftn group. The downloadable files, text, and images on this page are ©Shala Kerrigan 2003, however, recipe cards/note cards made using my blanks, finished ones, not the grey scale blanks can be offered for download/sale et cetra. I truly believe in sharing on the internet.)

Open a new image, 500x300 pixels, 100 ppi (pixels per inch). Fill it with your background color, a medium shade. In this one, I'll write a tutorial later for how I did the background effect. Apply a texture of some sort. Swirl in eyecandy, little bubbles or little crystals works really well.
Isn't that pretty? A bit dark to write on. But pretty!!! Double click the color you flood filled in, and note the hue number. You'll need it on the next step.

Okay, Layers/new layer, then selections/select all. Selections/modify/contract 30 pixels, then selections/modify/feather 25, now switch your foreground to pattern by clicking the little arrow,

and set it at note_rule, 100 %, angle 0.
Flood fill the new layer. Then go to colors/colorise, remember where you noted the hue? Colorise the lines by setting it at that hue, about 180 for saturation.
Go to your layers tab, and lower opacity on that layer to about 70.

Layers, new layer.
Add your tube, get it positioned just right. In this case, after I added my tube, I decided I didn't like the background color, so I picked a color
from the tube using the color picker (the little eyedropper) and changed the colors on the previous 2 layers using the colors/colorize to that hue, set at 150 saturation for both.
Back on the tube layer, Selections/select all, selections/float, selections/modify/expand 5 pixels, selections/modify/feather 15 pixels.
*WHEEE!* almost done!
Go back down to the lines (layer 2) and hit the delete key twice.

finished card

Layers/merge all, save as a .jpg.
I hope you find this tutorial helpful!!
For a different and pretty method to do recipe cards, check out
Ravena Crow's Recipe Cards
and Wompie Tuts. She has a bunch of printable tutorials using selections.

Another card using one of the blanks included in the zip.

Click here to go back to my home page.