Festive Clip Art

Adding holiday art to photos

Part of the holiday fun is getting dressed up and taking family photos for use in greetings cards, as gifts, to post on your blog, etc.

Well, it can be even MORE fun to add the art after the photo was snapped. Competely unbeknownst to the person who's in the photo.

In this tutorial, that's what you're going to learn.

The first step is to find some affordable, high-quality clipart-ish illustrations. That's easy enough to do over at iStockphoto. You can search for keywords yourself (santa hat, elf socks, etc.) or you can use their handy dandy season search found on the left side of the home page. Be sure to choose an illustration so that the background will be see-through.

Step 1: Once you've downloaded a piece of art, pop open the soon to be santa-ized photo in Elements (or Photoshop). Choose File > Place and navigate to where the file lives on your hard drive (probably your Desktop). Be sure to pick the EPS or AI file. Click OK, and then click OK yet again in the resulting dialog box, shown below.

Step 2: The art will most likely need to be resized and automatically has resizing handles on each corner. Hold the Shift key while dragging any corner to make the art smaller.

Step 3: If you need to rotate the art, just place the mouse below one of the corner handles and drag upward. Press Return when finished.

By using the Place command, the art came in on its own layer so that you can move it independently from the photo using the Move Tool.

Now that's fun right thar :)