Digital Paper Piecing

A lot of people get pleasure from paper piecing and as our crafting has become more and more digital over the last couple of years, I thought I'd share a technique I find useful - digital paper piecing. This is one of those techniques that takes longer to explain than it does to do and once you know how to do it, it's very useful. Sometimes I paper piece the whole image and sometimes I just do part of the image and leave the rest to colour by hand. I'm going to show you how to do this using photoshop but I know it can be done with other graphics programs too, including paint.net which is a free program. You can use any digi designer papers that you have on your computer or CDs for this.

1. start by opening the image you want to use (in jpg format), and using the magic eraser (or equivalent if you are using another program) erase just the area you want to paper piece.

I've done just the jeans here and plan to use the denim paper from Joanna Sheen's Fashion boutique CD rom.

2. Open the dp you want to use too. I find it easier to have both screens visible side by side but there's no reason that you must if you prefer to work another way. With the dp screen selected, select layer > duplicate layer. This step is important so don't skip it. You'll see that you are now working in the copied layer if you look at the side panel:

 

3. With your digi image screen selected, go to select > select all then go to edit > copy. Click on the blue bar at the top of your dp screen to select it then edit > paste.

As you can see, the denim paper is now visible where I cleared the background in step 1 and looking at the side bar you will see the image as layer 2 - with just this layer selected go to layer > merge down.

Your side panel will now look like this:

Using the cropping tool, crop round the edge of the white of your image then edit > copy. You can now close the dp and the original image - make sure you don't save any changes.

4. Open a new document and select for it to have a transparent background then paste your image into this. Repeat step 1 to clear the background from the next part of the image you want to paper piece, then step 2 with your next piece of dp. In this instance I wanted to do the sofa with the pastel blue polished stone paper from Crafty Ann's.

Having transferred my image across, I moved it about on the paper until I found the area that worked best for the effect I wanted then did layers > merge down again:

Then crop around the white area again and copy into a new document. With this particular image, I decided to stop here because I want to colour the rest by hand but you can paper piece the whole image if you want to like I have done with both of these below, just by repeating these steps as often as necessary.

Venetian Mask 2 has been completely paper pieced using polished stone and mottled stone dps (all from Crafty Ann's) and a photograph of an evening sky over Gran Canaria believe it or not!

 

Faberge Style Egg, tropical beach has been done with various dps from Crafty Ann's. 

A really good advantage to paper piecing digitally before printing off is that you don't waste any ink and every little helps!