Tips, Trends, and Techniques - Stickers

Hello all you Trixie Scraps fans!  Today is my first Tips, Trends, and Techniques Tuesday and I figured we might want to take a look at using and making "stickers" for our layouts.  I have found that stickers can go a long way in layouts, from adding a "fun" feel to helping make an element or title stand out more on a "tough" background.  I will try my best to make my little tutorial understandable since I use a program called PhotoImpact X3 (made by Ulead before it was taken over by Corel).  It is my understanding that you Photoshop users SHOULD be able to figure out how to do the same things from my instructions.  So, here we go... I will show you how to make a sticker from an alpha.

I don't know about you, but it seems as if we all choose our titles for our layouts towards the end, so my layout is almost finished and I want one of the words in my title to stand out a bit more and a sticker is a good way to do that.  I have choosen to make each letter an individual sticker, but you can apply this technique to a whole word or element as well.  Here is my Layout almost done, but no title:

Next I will open up a letter, copy it onto a separate white area/page, and select my Magic Wand Tool as seen here:

Click in any of the white area to highlight around the letter, select (I just right click in my program) "invert" to make the selection around the letter ONLY, and then select (again, I just right click) "Expand/Shrink" (this will make the white area underneath your letter/word/element) and select a size you want to make the white space around your sticker:



Our next step is to go back to our regular selection tool, click in the little white area that is now our sticker, "copy" it, and then paste it into our layout, like this:

I want you to now go back and select your letter, "copy" it, and paste it in your layout, just like you did with the sticker part. 

Finally, select both pieces (sticker and letter) and "merge as a single object."

I chose to make each letter a separate sticker because I wanted to layer them on top of one another, but you can always write out the word in whole, merge it as a single object, and then do the steps above.  It would look something like this:

Also, please remember to make very little shadow, if any, when using stickers... if you were using them in real life, they wouldn't make a shadow. 

I hope you find this tutorial helpful and fun to play with for use in your future layouts.  Here is my final layout using Trixie's Defining Me kit and the Defining Me Alpha Freebie:

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