Creating Scraps of paper in Photoshop CS

Now create a selection with the rectangular marquee tool as such.

Now choose a pastel color from the color picker.

Press Alt Backspace to fill the selection with this new foreground color.

Now choose a large, bristly brush from the brush drop down menu or palette. Create a blank layer to keep this separate from the filled purple layer.

picker.

Go ahead and choose a slightly lighter or darker shade of your color/purple by first double clicking on the color

Now go ahead and just dab the brush onto the blank layer by cilcking and releasing in different places. This is to give a weather look or add texture to the paper.

If you have the filled layer still selected, on this new blank layer the brush will only dab WITHIN the selected area on the new layer.

Now switch to a lighter shade of purple to add even more texture with your brush to this layer.

Lower the opacity if you want to help the weathering blend into the layer beneath a little bit more.

If you like where you're at with this dabbing layer, then link this layer to the fill layer as shown.

Now use Ctrl E or go to Layer: Merge Linked to merge them into one layer.

Now you can add some more effects to the 'paper' to make it look more realistic and weathered. Go to the Filter menu or filter gallery in Photoshop CS and try something like Spatter.

Often when using filters, you'll have to have SOME kind of texture on the layer first in order for it to apply to the layer.

In the new filter gallery you can go ahead and use more than one effect together. Press the new filter button and then pick another filter to see how they will look together; kind of like layering.

Here I've changed one of them to crosshatch. This has also really defined the edges for me to look more like paper. Press OK when you are done.

You can use the filter gallery to experiment and create all kinds of different 'scraps' or 'papers'. I like to duplicate a copy first if I'm going to make more changes and then hide the original.

This is a nice little technique here. To get different colored papers you wouldn't use color filling or paint brushes..you want to retain the textures that are already there so go to Image: Adjustments: Hue/
Saturation or Ctrl/Cmd U.

In the dialog box, click colorize and then move the hue slider to a slightly different color hue. Moving the saturation bar to the left will take the color out of the adjustment and moving it to the right will increase the saturation and intensity. Keep the saturation low b/c we're working in lighter 'background' colors such as pastels so we can put stuff on top of them.

Press OK when done and drag the layer to the new layer icon to create a duplicate. Now you can change the hue on this one also to a different color.

You can do that as many times as you want different colored papers from your original one.

Here the edge effects are pretty strong but it's too late now so I'm just going to use a bristly brush Eraser tool to start eating away some more pixels to make it look more weathered or torn.

You'll almost always want to add a little drop shadow to your paper scraps. Double click on the left side of the layer, right click and choosing Blending Options or choose Drop shadow from the lower left pop up menu (I'm not saying those again!)

Go ahead and name your layers if you want; something that you can remember. You can duplicate any layer effect (or all of them) by dragging the layer effect/style from one layer to the bottom line of another in the layers palette. Try that out.

Now you can go ahead and create a new blank layer after putting those in a layer set. Create a rectangular marquee, fill it and use your bristly Eraser brush to start weathering this piece of paper/fill.

Once you are done erasing or painting dabs onto your new paper to weather it (you can lower the opacity of the brush for a less strong effect) you can Ctrl T to size it down some more if you want.

Add a drop shadow if you want.

Here I erased too much so I'm sampling with the eyedropper the same color so I repaint it over the erased areas (aren't you proud I recorded this live?).

Go ahead and create duplicates once you're happy and use the same Hue technique to change the colors slightly.

Then organize them into a layer set. This is a technique in which you can keep trying different variations of brushes or filters to keep coming up with different scraps of your own!