Adding a Mat to Your Doodles

Let’s take those doodles one step further. I’ve taught you how to color your doodles using fills in Photoshop and using your digital scrapbook papers. Now let’s add a mat to those doodles — the ones you’ve colored in yourself and the ones from your favorite designers that didn’t come with a mat. (I’m all about stretching your stash and making it more useful!)

Adding a Mat to Your Digital Stamps and Doodles

1. Grab an already colored doodle and choose a solid paper for the mat. Pull both into your document, with the doodle on top of the paper. (I picked the track hoe/digger and a black paper from Under Construction, my new collab with simply scraps.)

2. CTRL+click on the doodle’s THUMBNAIL. Marching ants will appear around your doodle. (For simplicity’s sake, I’ve turned off the paper layer by clicking on the eye icon.)

3. Expand the selection by going to Select > Modify > Expand. Choose the number of pixels … 15 pixels gives a nice small border — choose a higher number for a thicker border. Click OK — the marching ants will be expanded around your doodle. If you think you’ll want a thicker border than the number you originally chose, just go back in your Undo History palette and redo the Expand step, this time choosing a bigger number.

4. Fill the selection — add a new layer BELOW the doodle and use ALT+Backspace to fill. As you can see in the second picture, we need to fill the empty space created by the track hoe’s window. (If you don’t have any empty spaces in your fill, you can skip to step 6).

5. Make sure you’re on the filled layer and grab your magic wand, making sure Contiguous is checked. Click inside the area you want to fill — in my case, the empty track hoe window. Expand this selection by using the same process in Step 3. Usually you can use the same number you used before, if your fill area isn’t too close to an edge. If it is close to an edge, choose a smaller number, like 3 pixels. Add a new layer UNDER the other fill layer and use ALT+Backspace to fill. Merge your fill layers.

6. Turn your paper layer back on, move it above the fill layer, and clip it to the fill layer. After getting this far, I decided I wanted a thicker border, so I went back and did steps 3-6 over again, using 25 pixels instead of 15 pixels.

7. OPTIONAL: Add an inner glow to your mat. You’ll find it with your layer styles. Choose Soft Light for the blending mode and 75% for the opacity. Click on the color box and type 282828 for the hex code. Adjust the size of your inner glow … I think I picked somewhere around 35.

8. Finally, merge all the layers together.

I’d love to see what you create using this tutorial. Be sure to link me up in the comments!

Have a great Thursday, and don’t forget to shop Scrap Orchard’s retirement sale — I have 23 retiring products that are 60% off!