Our Bible Friends

For school I do a bible class every day and my kids get very easily distracted if there are no pictures or something visual for them to focus on so I made these bible friends from the dolls and clothes from the makingfriends.com website. I also added some of my own hair and clothing accessories. It's way easy, here's how I do it. I copy the images of clothes or people or whatever from their website onto my hard drive. I open it in Paint Shop Pro, increase the colors to 16 million, select the magic wand tool, click on the white background, then go ctrl+shift+i to get the selection around all the articles on the page, copy and paste into a new image which gives me a transparent background. There might be an easier way to do this but I haven't figured it out yet. Then I take the freehand selection tool and draw around each item and paste them into a new image, I do the magic wand trick again to make sure that the image saves the smallest dimensions possible. Then I save clothes in one folder, hair and hats in another, and misc in another. I have the dolls in a separate folder too. Then I open one of the dolls, click on shoes or whatever article of clothing I want to add, copy it, paste as a layer in the doll file, move it around to get it just right, then add another article of clothing or hair, headgear... till I have the doll the way I want it. Then I copy merged and paste into a new document, crop it to the right size and voila, my very own bible friend. Here are a few so you can see what I'm talking about (I made these in b&w so my kids could color them, but they would be pretty easy to color in psp):