A Custom Brush and a Gift Certificate

Hi, It's Andrea again with a guest blog posting.
I was looking through my mom's recipes and found several from my great-grandma.  They were in her handwriting!  It's beautiful!
It started me thinking about digital scrapbooking.  Unless we've paid someone to create a font with our handwriting, everything we journal is in someone else's font.  Maybe that is a good thing, if your penmanship looks like mine, but even if your writing looks like chicken scratch, someday your great granddaughter is going to find it special.
So here is the challenge for this week: We are going to create a custom brush with your handwriting.  It's fun and easy and you could win a $2.00 gift certificate to the Scraps N' Pieces store!
You can create a new layout for this challenge or use one you've already finished.  You choose.

Here are the steps to create your custom brush:
1- Get a plain white piece of paper and a crayon or marker- the darker the better, preferably black. Ok, now you digi-scrapper gals, I'm referring to a real piece of paper and a writing utensil not digital.
2- Write something.  It could be a big title for your layout, a sentiment, whatever you want on your layout.  Make it nice and big- use about half the page. Here is mine,  It is landscape layout on a regular piece of paper:

3- Scan it in at 400 dpi or higher and in color (not black and white).
4- Save it as a jpeg.
5- Open it in Photoshop.
6- If you wrote in a color other than black, you need to turn it black and white.
To do that go to your Effects Area and click on the Photo Effects icon(third from the left).  From the drop-down menu, choose monotone colors, then Tint Black and White.
Result: This creates a black and white copy on top of original layer.  Merge these two layers together.
7- To make a good brush, it needs to be as black and white as possible.  We are going to adjust the levels to make the paper very white and the writing very black.
First: in the Layers area, click on the "create adjustment layer" icon.  It is a circle filled in half white and half grey.
Choose Levels from the drop-down menu.
In the center of the Levels box, there is a graph with a black triangle, grey triangle and white triangle.  Slide the black triangle towards the middle of the graph.  Then slide the white triangle towards the middle.  Adjust it until it is as black and white as you can get it without distorting your handwriting.

When finished, Click Ok.
Merge the two layers together- the background and Levels 1 layers.

8- It's time to crop your image.  I am going to make three different brushes out of my handwriting.  First I crop everything away and just leave "A Superhero, a princess, and a cute witch!" .  I'll come back and make two other brushes from "Halloween, 2012" and "Jaron, Sydnee, and Savannah"  You'll probably have everything in one brush so just crop away all the extra white paper.
Here is mine:

9- A brush can only be a maximum of 2500 pixel.  If your image is bigger than that, Photoshop won't let you create a brush out of it.  You will probably need to re-size your image.
Go to the Image menu, then Re-size  then Image Size.  Look at the pixel dimension and if one of them is over 2500, re-size it to be 2500 and click OK.  (If it is smaller than 2500, there is no need to change it, just cancel)
10- We are ready to make a brush!  Go to the Edit menu, select Define Brush, give it a name (no spaces in the name) and click OK.
Your brush is ready!
11- Go to your layout and click on the brush tool.
12- Hover over your layout and if your brush is what you created, choose a color and stamp it on your layout!
If your brush isn't what you just created, right click with your mouse anywhere on your layout and scroll to the bottom of the brushes box.  Your new brush should be the last one.  Click on it.  Then click on your layout.
Remember you can re-size your brush, change the color or opacity, or you can change the angle by clicking on the paintbrush with the blue tip at the top of your screen.

Here is my finished layout.  I made and used three different custom brushes on it.

If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to help!

I can't wait to see what you do.  Link up your layout and at the end of the contest period we'll pick a winner!  They will receive a $2.00 gift certificate to the Scraps N' Pieces store!
Happy Scrappin'