Welcome to another edition of the Trixie Scraps Tips, Trends and Techniques Tuesday. It is my pleasure today to host and refresh our memories on the Modify Tool. I am using PSE 7 in this tutorial.

Today I am going to use the Modify tool to make an easy journaling mat, but you can use these techniques to do a lot of other things once you grasp it (which, is not too difficult Wink ) I am going to focus on the “Contract” selection but you can also use the “Expand” option for the reverse effect.

First, make yourself a nice paper shape:

Now, hover over the thumbnail of the layer and press “ctrl” and right click at the same time. This will select the entire shape (marching ants should be going around the whole perimeter of your paper).

Now, find the “Select” option along the top tool bar and then hover over the “Modify” option in that drop down menu. Another drop down menu will open with an option for “Contract” Click on this option.

A box should open that asks how many pixels you want to contract by. The largest contraction you can do is by 100 pixels. I chose 100.

Your marching ants should have moved inside your paper shape- or have been shrunk down a bit. Now, create a new layer (with the ants still marching..)

And select the paintbucket tool (the color does not matter). click on your new layer, inside the marching ants. Viola! A smaller size of your paper shape appears. Now you can clip a coordinating paper to it.

Do this by dragging the paper you chose on top of your new layer. Now hover between the new, smaller sized paper shape and the paper you want to clip to it while holding down the “alt” key. This should make a symbol appear that looks like two intersecting circles. Right Click on your mouse and it should “clip” your paper to the layer below it.

Merge these two layers and you have a perfect, uniform mat for your journaling! If you want to triple your mat, simply repeat the above process.

I love how this tool can help me uniformly shrink or enlarge an area for matting or creating new looks with existing elements. I hope you have fun with it too!

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