Sometimes, the journaling on a layout requires a little bit of finesse. If you want to print your journaling instead of handwriting it, that means you can’t easily just add your journaling after you’ve placed your elements, you have to do it before you print!

That’s where custom text boxes come in handy. Now, these can get complicated using the path tool to draw a box point by point, but I’m going to show you an easier way using just your Rectangular Marquee tool and then subtracting from that path with a few clicks.

First, using your rectangular marquee tool, draw a box that’s the exact size of the area you wish to fill with text, ignoring any overlapping embellishments. In this case, it’s the upper half of my journaling card.

Once you have your basic box selected, you’re going to CMD (CTRL) + OPT (ALT) + click the thumbnail of each layer you wish to subtract from the selection in the layers palette. CMD (CTRL) + click selects that layer while holding down OPT (ALT) subtracts it from the current selection.

So in the image below, I CMD (CTRL) + OPT (ALT) + clicked the layer thumbnails (pictured at right) of the orange diamond, blue flower, letter g and ROAM flair in the layers palette to remove their shapes from my original rectangular selection.

Now, the text path is much too close to the edge of the card and the edges of the embellishments, so I need to make it smaller. To do so, go to Select>Modify>Contract to contract the selection.

I chose to contract by 30 pixels, but 20 would have been fine too if I had more to say and needed more room.

Now you can see that the selection has decent clearance from the edges and each embellishment, but we need to turn it into a path now!

Open the paths palette and then click the diamond shape at the bottom. If you hover over that, it will say “Make work path from selection”

Now we have a custom path from our selection!

To turn it into a text box, just click inside the selected path with your text tool and it will auto-fill with placeholder text that you can now replace.