Several of my readers have asked me how to add their personal signature to their digital art. If you are lucky enough to have a digital pen and the software that will capture and store your pen strokes as you write your signature, this becomes a simple process. However, for those of us who still use the mouse to create their digital art, we will need to start with a scan of our signature.

The first step is to write your signature on a piece of paper (usually white) and scan it into Adobe^R Photoshop^R. If you will be creating your digital art for print, you probably have already set the resolution of your artwork to 300 dpi or larger. You will want to scan your signature at that same resolution. See the User's Guide for your scanner for details.

1. Once the resolution is decided, go to the Menubar in Photoshop and click File> Import. You will see a list of import options. Click on the name of your scanner.
   
   
2. Once the scan is complete, use the Crop tool to crop away the surrounding area from your signature. Try to crop as close to your signature as possible without cutting away any of the signature.
   
   
3. If the artwork for which you want to add your signature has a white area, you can simply copy and paste your signature onto a new layer in your artwork. Then use the Move tool to place the signature over the white area.
   

That's easy enough. But most of your art will not have an nice white area just waiting for your signature and you do not want to see an ugly white rectangle on top of your art. Of course, you could try to select the white background with Photoshop's Magic Wand tool and remove the white from around the signature. However, your result will probably have a white shadowing or ghosting around the signature. This is not the result we want. What we need is a way to digitize your signature into a format that can be used any time, on top of any background and at any size. We need to convert your signature to a vector object or shape.

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