In the next few Photoshop^R tutorials, we will make three Halloween potion labels, featuring the three witches from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. We will begin, in this tutorial, by creating the background paper design.

Finished Project

Our first step is to decide on the resolution for our project. It’s still common to use a 300 dpi resolution for downloadable digital art destined for an ink jet printer. Each of the labels will be 2.5 x 4 inches. Let’s make the background paper 12 x 12 inches so that it can also be used in other projects.

The top layer will determine the color and also contain a little texture. The second layer has most of the texture. Once we are finished, we can easily change the color of the paper by adjusting the Hue/Saturation of the top layer.

1. Fill the default layer with #eee0c9. This is a nice light tan color that is a good starting point for our paper.
   
   
2. We will add a little grain texture with a filter. Click Filter - Filter Gallery to open the Filter Gallery. Select the Film Grain thumbnail and set the following values and click OK.
   
   Grain 3
   Highlight 0
   Intensity 0
   
   
3. Next we will add a little more texture with the Sponge filter. Set the following values and click OK.
   
   Brush Size 10
   Definition 1
   Smoothness 1
   
   The next layer below will supply most of the texture for our paper. In the example, I used the Rice Paper pattern from the collection included with the book Adobe Photoshop Elements One-Click WOW.
   
   
4. Add and fill a second layer and drag it under the previous layer. Double-click to open the Layer Style dialog box. Check the Pattern Overlay option and choose a pattern that is gray or ivory in color.
   
   
5. Adjust the Scale of the pattern as needed to look like parchment. For the example, I increased the Scale to 200%.
   
   
6. Now we will blend the two layers by setting the Blending Mode of the top layer to Color.
   
   
7. I like the color but the intensity is a little to much. Let’s reduce the Opacity of the top layer to 40%.
   
   

Now that we have the background paper, we can save the .psd file and use a copy of the .psd file for the next step in our project. Also, we can use the background paper for another project and, when needed, we can change the color of the parchment paper by adjusting the Hue, Saturation and Lightness in the Hue/Saturation dialog box (Image - Hue/Saturation and check the Colorize box).

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