Creating Fancy Arrows Digitally.

This month's inspiration kit at Counterfiet Kit Challenge comes with loads of arrows of different shapes and sizes. There are three main ways to create arrows for your digital scrapbooking pages or for printing out in hybrid crafting.

Papers used in examples from the retired P365 Mega kit by Ju Kniepp

1. Using Custom Shapes
2. Using the Line Tool
3. Freehand Drawing.

I'm going to walk through the first two with you today.

Using the Custom Shapes Tool
Arrow shapes can be drawn using the custom shapes tools. There are two basic arrow shapes in Craft Artist (including the free cutdown version).

1. Arrow
2. Double Arrow

Altering the properties of the arrow using the tool bar will change the size, width and thickness of the different parts of the arrow. The resulting arrow can be coloured or used as a shape cutter for your digital papers. (Tutorial previously written for how to do this in Craft Artist.)

By adding different custom shapes together you can create more fancy shaped arrows. Simply draw the two shapes and place them next to, or overlapping each other to form your new shape. Here are a few ideas to get you started. Remember to add the shapes together before attempting to use them to crop papers with.

1. Rectangle with a chevron head and tail.
2. Rectangle with a heart head.
3. Corner added to a single arrow.
4. Wave added to a single arrow.

Using the Line Tool
Craft Artist comes with lots of fun options for line styles and these can be mix and matched to create straight, curved or wavy arrows for your scrapbooking pages. These cannot be used to crop papers but can be made in any colour you like. For thick line arrows you can still add special effects like shadows etc.

• In the Colour Box Set the colour of your line.
• Goto the Line Styles Box
• Set the width of your line to something simple to start with like 5.0 pt. 

• Draw a line using the Pencil Tool.
• If you hold down the shift key as you draw then it will make a straight line.

• Add an arrow head to the front of the line using the drop down box.

• Similarly you can add a tail or second arrow head to the other end.

• The line style itself can also be changed to dotted or double etc. Experiment with the settings and see what you like.

Enjoy making arrows and using them in your projects,
Blessings to you all from Angela