Mock Journal Tutorial

Journal Mockup Tutorial.

You will need Photoshop (or a similar program) and a good working knowledge of how to use it to do this tutorial.

I had a lot of fun doing this mockup and I was very pleased with my results. Many of the companies to whom I've been submitting my designs make fancy journals so a mockup of a nice journal seemed appropriate.

1. Open a new 8 x 10 300 dpi document in Photoshop and name it "Mockup Journal."  Add a new layer and make a rectangle with rounded corners.

2. With your marquee tool, square up the left side so that it has sharp corners.

3. Duplicate this layer, close the 'eye' to make it invisible and then switch back to the original layer. Click on the little checkerboard square up in the top of the layers palette to lock your shape.

4. In your underneath color picker, choose a papery sort of color like a very light tan. Hit ctrl >backspace to fill the shape.  Change your upper color picker to a shade slightly grayer than your paper color to outline your page edges. Go into edit>stroke> and choose 5 pixels for the size and 'inside' for where you want your line and hit 'enter.'

5. Now here comes the fun part, making some pages for your journal! Choose and capture your paper shape with the marquee tool. Then, with the shape still captured, in the tools palette change it to the wand. 

6. Simulaneously hit ctrl>shift>alt> and the Up arrow key. Look what happens! PS makes a duplicate of your shape and piles it on top of the first one. To make the perspective a bit better you'll want to move the shape over while it's still selected. Hit 'V' and move it over.

7. Repeat step 7 until you have a nice stack of pages.

8. Let's make our paper look like it's been read a few times. Go into your Filter palette. Choose Filter>Distort>Pinch. Set your slider to the left at about -25% and click 'OK.' Now our paper stack looks a little less rigid.  With the burn tool, shade the pages on the sides a bit to add some shadows, especially on the corners.

10. Turn your 'cover' layer back on  then choose a pattern for it. If you have repeating tiles saved in your patterns palette you can just pour it in with the bucket tool. Or, you can open and drag your design into a new layer above your cover shape and then trim it to fit using the wand tool in the layer below.  Line it up over your pages.

11. Go down to the lower left corner of your journal and, with the pen tool, make a curved line around the edges of your pages to make it look like book binding. Go into the pages layer and shade them a bit where the binding would make a shadow.

12. Create a new layer and name it 'strap.'  With the marquee tool make a long skinny rectangle. Choose a complimentary color with your underneath color picker, then hit ctrl>backspace to fill it. Click the little checkerboad in the top of the layers palette to lock it.

13. With your pen tool make a few vertical lines through it in a darker shade. Trim off the edges so they're flush with your cover and use the burn tool at the ends for shadowing.

14. Create a new layer and with the round marquee tool, make an oval. Hit ctrl>backspace to fill it with the color of your choice and and in the layers palette choose layer>style>bevel & emboss.

17.  Choose some text or a monogram, center it over the oval and you're done! 

Now you're ready to wow stationery companies with your designs. Thanks for reading!