After mentioning my guest room wall art project on Instagram, I’ve gotten a lot of requests for a tutorial from my high school students and IG friends. Since then, I decided to make this project part of my spring curriculum in a few of my classes! Because of this, I made a curriculum tutorial…and just had to share it with you!

{FYI: I used Photoshop CS5 for this tutorial} If you don’t have Photoshop, compile a folder of the images that you would like to use and sweetly ask someone who has Photoshop to make this for you…this tutorial will take an experienced Photoshopper 5-10 minutes (with printing time) to complete.

This tutorial is for beginners. (and if you’re a beginner…hooray for trying this out!!) It should be pretty straight forward, but if you have any questions, comment below and I’ll try my best to answer! Enjoy!

Step 1: Pick out your Mom’s favorite hymn (or pick your own favorite song, hymn, page out of a book) scan it, and open it into Photoshop.

Step 2: Crop.




Step 3: Open the image you’ll place on top of the hymn. I googled “free vintage botanicals” and found a hi-res picture of this flower, saved it to my desktop and opened it in Photoshop. If you have old books with vintage illustrations, you can simply scan in the illustrations just as you did with the hymn. Other fun image ideas: horses, owls, flowers, vintage furniture.


Step 4: Right click the background layer and select “duplicate layer”. Press OK.


Step 5: While your background copy is highlighted blue, go to “Select” and choose “Color Range”.


Step 6: In color range, your curser will turn into an eye-dropper tool. Use the eyedropper tool to click the background on the actual picture (the green star represents the place that I clicked). This step tells Photoshop to select everything in the photo BESIDES the color you clicked on.



Step 7: Press OK. Once OK is pressed, you will see a selection around the the image.


Step 8: Press DELETE on your keyboard then turn off the “eyeball” next to the background layer. Your image will now be by itself on a transparent background (a gray and white checked background). If some of the background remains behind the image, use your eraser to clean it up.


Step 9 and 10: To deselect the image, press Command D on a Mac, Ctrl D on a PC. This step will take away the selection around the image. Press the “V” key to select the move tool, or just click on it in your tools panel. Click on the image and drag it up and over to the hymn. Do not let go of your image until it’s dragged directly over the hymn picture.



Step 11: After your image makes it on top of your hymn, it’s time to resize! Make sure your “Show transform controls” box is checked. Hold down shift and drag the corners of the image to resize. It may appear blurry when you resize it. Just press “Enter” after it’s resized to set the image, and the image will turn sharp again.


Step 12: This step is optional…I like to see through the image to make it look more vintage so I simply turned down the opacity between 80-85%.



Step 13: Print and frame! I haven’t framed my prints yet, but I’ll be sure to take pictures when I do!! I made a series of 6 prints, and will be framing them in two rows of three above the guest room bed. (P.S. I printed my photos on 8.5×11 matte photo paper from a Canon printer).

Step 14: Get creative!! To make it look more vintage, sponge dark tea on the paper! The possibilities are endless!