Turning a black and white stamp into a color masterpiece

Hello everyone.

Yesterday Norma asked a question in the forum so I thought I would answer it here in the form of a quick tutorial.

First get your base image.

Then find the paper you would like to use as an overlay.  In this case one of the wonderful colored papers from the fire and ice kit.

In order to make the final graphic you will need to resize the paper you use as an overlay.  I resized it to 4" x 4".  To resize go to Image>Image size and new dialog box appears.  You can then specify the size and hit OK or enter.  

At this point you should have two windows open in your workspace.  The stamp graphic and resized paper.  Simply drag the resized paper onto the stamp graphic.  You will be able to move it around until you have it in your desired position.  Once you have it located where you want it go to the layers palette to make sure you have the stamp graphic and the resized paper stacked with the paper on top.

Then to make your colorful graphic go to the layers menu>create clipping mask and magically your colored graphic appears.  You are still on a transparent background here so the preserve the transparency go to the layer menu and select merge down or merge visible and then save as a png.

Now you can go ahead and use your multicolored graphic on a layout or card as I have done below.

I hope you find this useful.