Make a bookplate template, and you can use it again and again. Books make wonderful gifts for teachers, birthdays, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Adding a personalized touch always makes a gift more special.
I created a template using Chic Deco Frames & Stamps by Mujka Design Inc along with Free Digital Stamps Vases and Flowers by Cocoa Studio.
Step 1: I chose one of the elegant frames and opened it in Adobe Photoshop CS. Next, I resized it to 3.5 inches x 3.5 inches, which will work well with a book cover.
Step 2: I chose one of the flowers in the free flower stamps set and added color to it. I chose pink and green to color. Item 1 in this picture shows the colors I chose. Item 2 is the magic wand tool that I used to select the area to color. Item 3 is the paint bucket tool, that I used for each color, to fill in the selected area with color.
Step3: I dropped the flower graphic onto the book plate frame. Then resized the graphic and rotated it to fit in the corner. Take a look at the graphic. I had both items open in Photoshop. Then I dragged the flower onto the frame. Once it was there, it was a little too big, so I used CTRL-T to size it down and then rotated it to be the angle that I wanted for the corner. From there, I just moved it to the corner.
Step 4: Since my flower was the right size for the frame, I wanted to duplicate it and use it in the other corner of the frame. To do this, I went to the layers section, right clicked on the layer I wanted to duplicate, pressed the right-click button on my mouse and chose the “duplicate layer” option. Again, I dragged the flower to the corner and used CTRL-T to rotate the flower until I had it the way I wanted it.
From there I had my completed template. I saved it with a file name I’ll recognize next time I need to personalize a book for someone. If you look at the first graphic above, you can see that I filled the text into the template to dedicate some books to our elementary school to honor a fabulous teacher who is moving out of state at the end of the school year. She loved them!
