Tutorial Thursday - Magic Tricks with Digital Stamps

Hi all - Debbie P here with a little trick to help you out with your La-La Land Crafts digital stamps. If you want to merge them OR digital paper piece with them there's a simple little tool that can help you remove the opaque sections of your image to make it easy for you. I use a free software called paint.NET. I've had mine for a while so can't recommend any particular site to download it from so just google it and I'm sure you'll have no problems.

I'm a visual learner so I hope the photos I've included here help you too.

The first this to do is open the program. Select the file tab and choose open from the drop down menu. Find the file (digital stamp) you want to use and import it onto the screen.

Now this is where the magic starts - and the tool you need is appropriately called the magic wand. You'll find this in the drop down tool menu. Select the magic wand.

Drag the wand over to your image and click on the area you want to turn see though. I've had to point it out here because it's only small. Once it's in place left click and the area will turn blue.

Hit the delete button and the area turns checkerboard - the white background has now been removed. How easy was that!

The last thing to do is use the "save as" button to save the changes you have made without changing the original.

And the trick to keeping your cleared area clear is to save your image in .PNG format - so scroll down and select this option. Follow the prompts to save your image.

And now here's another trick you can do with the magic wand - you can use it to digitally paper piece! Ironically the only problem I have with Kimono Marci for this is that the white area around the image is too close to the image.

You can add extra area around the image in paint.NET by selecting the Canvas Size button under the image tab.

A new box will pop up and you simply move the image to the centre and add height and width.

I'm going to paper piece Marci's kimono so I use the magic wand the clear the areas of her kimono I want to paper piece in the same way I cleared the background earlier. Make sure you clear ALL the sections of her kimono as the magic wand only works on one part at a time.Save as a .PNG as before.

I then open up a new Word Document and insert a picture - in this case a Japanese digital designer paper. Re-size the paper to suit your image. In this case I'm making it smaller than the overall image to get more detail of the pattern showing in her kimono. Insert Marci with the "cleared kimono" into the word document.

Slide Marci over the designer paper and line up the pattern underneath to where you want it. You can now print her out onto some blending card and colour the rest of her in. No fussy cutting and glueing - great for people like me whose eyes aren't as good as they used to be!

Well I hope that gives you some fun ideas for how to use the magic wand and your La-La Land digital stamps. Until next time - happy stamping!

Debbie 

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