ELEMENT: Designing Papers Using ClipArt

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ELEMENT: Designing Papers Using ClipArt
By Zee Helmick 2006
Oct 2, 2006, 05:23

Clip art! It’s available everywhere and you’re dying to use it but can’t figure out how to get rid of those “jaggedy” edges. This tutorial will show you how to clean up your clip art and use it to create background paper. For this tutorial, I’ll be using image number 051 from Dover Electronic Clip Art Japanese Animal and Floral Designs.

Begin by opening a clip art image. Be sure to choose the highest resolution available on the clip art CD; typically these are the TIF files. You can also scan the clip art at a resolution of 300dpi.

Notice the jagged edges? Let’s get rid of them. Increase the color depth by clicking on Image, Increase Color Depth, RGB-8 bits/channel or by using the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+0).

Your image will appear the same, however you’ve now changed it from a black and white image to an image capable of millions of colors.

Click on Adjust > Blur > Gaussian Blur and enter a Radius of 1. Click OK.

You should now have a slightly blurry image.

You could use this as your paper’s design as is, but let’s continue and try to get the edges looking sharper. The following steps should be followed loosely; it will depend on your clip art image and how jagged it is. The trick is to try combinations of the following steps (sometimes using them several times or even skipping steps)…it all depends on your image.

Edge Preserving Smooth: Adjust > Add/Remove Noise > Edge Preserving Smooth > enter a number for Amount of smoothing (this will depend on your clip art) > click OK.

This is the result:

Sharpen: Adjust > Sharpness > Sharpen or Sharpen More (again, this depends on your clip art image)
This is the result using Sharpen More:

Notice how the edges are starting to become jagged again. For this image, the Sharpen More effect was too much. Let’s try it with Sharpen instead:

This one looks better. You can now use this image as a pattern fill or create a custom brush. You could even get rid of the background and use the remaining by copying and pasting it into different areas of your background paper. Try changing the color. Try a grunge look by erasing portions of the image (this helps if you just can’t get rid of the jagged edges.)