I guess I’m late to the game with discovering just how darned fun WendyZine’s actions are.  I’m currently in love, must play with, have to babble fondly about her SCRIPT: Element Sprayer PRO (PSCS Only).

Here’s Wendy’s description:
This innovative and revolutionary script lets you "spray" elements along a path. Simply size the elements to the median size you want to use and save it. Then, draw a path or create a shape to spray your elements on. The PRO version allows you to select MULTIPLE elements, adjust the spacing, x/y, size and rotation jitters. And, you can use any drop shadow, or style available in your styles palette, or choose from 12 preset drop shadows. The result will be left in layers, with layer effects fully editable. You can also choose to have the shadows clipped to overlapping areas only.

If you only need to spray a single element and don’t need to control the shadows, look for the STANDARD version.PDF tutorial included. Tested in PSCS3-4 ONLY. This script will NOT work in PSCS2 and earlier. This script will NOT work in PSE.

What that means is you can treat pngs in a way very similar to using the brush tool in paths. There is a bit of a learning curve to get it operational, but Wendy includes a friendly tutorial to guide the way.

I’ve admired paper scrapper’s gem flourishes and sometimes I wished they were in more digital designers kits.  Now I can make my own! I extracted a gem from GlamFairy’s A Whimsical History kit and I made a png of it.

I created a path on my layout where I wanted the gem flourish to be, and I started up Wendy’s script, setting it to vary the size slightly of the gem but to not rotate the angle because I wanted to maintain the same light source; I opted for no shadows, so I could add them after the fact.

Vroom, vroom, vroom! That script is entertaining to watch in action. It created its own file, so I dragged them in place on my layout.

Not only did I shadow the finished flourishes, I clipped a very low opacity rainbow gradient on them.

Today I thought it would be fun to use seedbeads to create a shape. I extracted a bead from one of Birgit Kerr’s kits. I used this pointing hand shape that comes with PhotoShop CS4 to create my path. Again I started up her action; part way through a box comes up " this will create 137 layers, are you sure you want this?" Heck yeah! Because each bead was its own layer, I opted to nudge a few beads closer together. Another time it would be fun to do this with a variety of colored beads, but this as is sure works!

Do you want even more inspiration? Check out Kim’s Piggy layout. I love those acorns tumbling in the wind.