Statchoo Scraps Freebie Blog

Here’s an easy way to do those grungy edges on your scrapbook papers. It’s simple and you can get all sorts of different looks just by changing your brush or tweaking the brush settings.

So to start, make a new 12″x12″ document in Photoshop. Fill it with whatever color you want or leave it white. Create a blank layer to make the edges on – it’s easier because if you don’t like the way it turned out, you can just delete the layer and start over. And if you like it, you can save that layer as an overlay and use it over and over again! Now it’s time to set up your brush.

There are lots of grunge brushes available or you can make your own, but for a high resolution image the brush should be at least 200px – bigger if you can get it.

FYI: If you’re in the market for a set of high resolution grunge brushes, I bought a set of brushes here for only $8! They’re ok to use in commercial or personal work. The set comes with 188 brushes, and I use them ALL THE TIME. He has a sampler download with 2 brushes so you can try them out.

Just for grins, I’m going to use the first brush from Andrew’s sampler pack. Now that I’ve selected my brush, I open the brushes palette. This is where all the tweaking happens.

Those are the basics. I usually adjust the scatter, and you can play around with the other settings as well, but for now that’s enough. Now go back to the document, make sure you’re on the blank layer, and select all. Open the Paths Palette, and in the side menu, choose Make Work Path. You’ll get a path that’s right on the edge of your document.

Once you have your path, choose Stroke Path from the same menu, when the modal box opens, choose Brush.


And TADA! The finished edge. As you’ll see, the brush strokes right down the center of the path, so half of the brush is outside the document. That’s why we needed a BIG brush!

If you don’t like it, try udoing and running the stroke path again – because all the jitters we set earlier in the brushes palette, no two stroked paths will look the same. If you still don’t like it, go back to your brush palette and adjust some of the settings or try a different brush. Note that you’ll lose your current brush settings when you choose a new brush unless you save it first.

There you have it – you can use this method to not just do paper edges, but also frames, shapes or any selection that you can convert to a path!