This past week I began de-cluttering our house in preparation for moving at the end of this month.  While going through boxes I came across a project my daughter created while in Kindergarten twelve years ago.  It was looking a little worn considering its been in a box for all these years.  I decided it needed to be displayed instead of hidden away.  So I stopped all that I was doing and started making a scrap page.

Here is the end result:

Now I will explain how you can make this project with your children. 

First you obviously need the hand print.  So grab some paint and a piece of paper.  Cover your child’s left hand with the paint and then press hand onto the paper.  You will need to let the hand print dry thoroughly before scanning into the computer.

Once you have scanned in your hand print you will need to put it on a transparent background.  Or in my case, I need to remove the background from the original art project.  I will use Photoshop Elements to complete this process.

Open the image in Photoshop.  Using the Quick Selection Tool, select the area around the hand print.

Whenever you make a selection in Photoshop, you should make sure it is accurate before moving on to the next step.  To do this we will use the Refine Edge tool.  To get to the Refine Edge Tool, click Select from the Navigation Tool Bar and then scroll down to Refine Edge.  A new box will pop up.  I like to click on the Custom Overlay Color (red icon) which turns the area not selected red.  This allows me to easily see which area I have selected and which area is not selected.  Once I am finished making changes (if any) click OK. 

Once you are happy with your selection you will want to save it.  To do this, click on Select from the Navigation Tool Bar and then scroll down to Save Selection.  Give your selection a name and then save it.  The point of this step is so that if you ever need to modify the selection you can do so easily within the PSD file or in my case should you computer sometimes crash, you won’t have to make the selection again.

Now in my situation, I had scanned in an original art work project and I have a black background that I do not want.  To remove the background I am going to invert my selection so that I can easily delete the unwanted background.  To invert the selection, click on Select and then scroll down to Inverse.  This will place the marching ants around the background.  Now press Delete on your keyboard.  And in a flash you have a transparent background.

Looking at my project now, I see that I have a lot of wasted background space.  To clean up the space I am going to move the hand print to the upper left corner and crop out the unwanted background using the Crop Tool in Photoshop.

That’s better.  All I see now is my hand print.  Time to save the image.  You will want to save the image as a PNG file because you want to have a transparent background.  If you were to save this as a JPG, you would have a white background which will not work for digital scrapbooking and overlaying objects on different backgrounds.  To save this hand print as a PNG file, click on File and then scroll down to Save As.  Choose the location and name to save this file in.  Make sure you selection PNG file as the type from the drop down menu.

You now have a handprint that you can use for digital scrapbooking.  You can continue to use Photoshop for digital scrapbooking or whatever software program you generally use.  Personally, I do most of my digital scrapbooking with Heritage Makers Studio 3.0.  If you would like to give Heritage Makers Studio a try, send me an email and I will set you up with a Free basic account.  And during this month of February I will also give you a complimentary 12×12 scrap page so that you can complete this project as my way of saying thank you. 

If you are already a Heritage Maker, click here to get this template: Left to Right Template

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

• Storybooking
• Digital Tutorial: How to get Torn Pages in Adobe Photoshop Elements
• Project 365: Day 33