13 Days of Halloween – Decorated Paint Can: Design House Digital

Welcome to the last blog post in the 13 Days of Halloween Series. Today’s project is a pretty simple one in comparison to all the rest, but I find that it’s one that I use very often. We will be making a decorated paint can to house your Halloween goodies. You can use it as the treat “bag” your children use when you go trick or treating, or you can use it to tote the treats you bring into school for Halloween. Really, you can use it for anything. Who am I to tell you what to do? :)

To begin, you will need:

Paint Can (6.5” diameter x 6.75” high)
Computer
Halloween Themed Digital Scrapbook Kit. I used Gen’s adorable No Tricks, Just Treats Collection

8.5×11 Paper (or larger if you have a wide format printer)
Borderless Printer (You could use one that does not print borderless pages, but then you would have to tweak the measurements and print three pages to tape together.)
Tape Measure (if you are not using the same size can I used.)
Ribbon
Scissors or a paper trimmer.

Let’s begin:

Open a new canvas in your software program with a size of 20.5 “ x 6.5”.

Using the move tool, drag your background paper onto the canvas. Line it up with the top left corner of the document. As you will see, it does not cover the canvas. No worries. Read on…
Copy the background paper. (PC: Ctrl + J or Mac: Cmd + J) Now we are going to flip the copy we just made so that when we slide it over, the edges will match up perfectly and there will not be an obvious seam.
Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal.
Using the move tool, drag the background copy layer to the right side of the canvas until the edges of both papers line up perfectly.
Now we are going to mask out the holes for the handle hardware on the paint can. Select the Elliptical (Round) Marquee Tool. It may be hidden under the Rectangular Marquee Tool, which looks like a dashed rectangle.

Set it to a Fixed Size of .7 x .7.

Create a new layer. Layer > New > Layer.
With the Round Marquee tool selected, click anywhere on the background paper. We will move it into place later. You will see “marching ants” in a small circle.
Fill the circle with the Paint Bucket tool. (Quick Key = G)

Next, drag rulers out to guide you in placing the circles in the right spots. To show rulers, click on View > Rulers.
Starting from the ruler on the left hand side, drag from the left to =1.875 or one hash mark before 2 and drag another one out to 11.125 or one hash mark past 11, and from the top, drag out to .75 or two hash marks before 1.
Move the first circle under the horizontal line and to the left of the first vertical line and the second circle under the horizontal line and to the right of the second vertical line. This should set your circles up in the right spot. However, some printers make adjustments when printing, so you may have to tweak these numbers a bit. Some of this is trial and error. Hope you’re patient!

If you were able to find the same size paint can and don’t feel like doing the dirty work, you can pick up the base of the template on my blog.

Next, create a label and place your label centered inside the two guide lines. I drew out a custom frame shape using the shape tool.

Add a shadow to the frame.
Drag a paper over and clip it to the shape. (PC: Ctrl + G, Mac: Cmd + G).
Drag another paper over and place it under the frame.
Add a “Reveal All” Layer Mask to this paper layer. Layer > Add Layer Mask > Reveal All.
Erase portions of the paper that show from behind the edges of the frame. You do this by clicking on the layer mask in the layers palette. NOT ON THE PAPER LAYER, BUT ON THE MASK ICON BESIDE IT!
Select the brush tool. (Looks like a paintbrush.) Set it to black to conceal parts of the paper and erase away the parts that hang outside the frame. You can accomplish the same thing with the eraser tool.
Add your alpha, and you’re done!

Now to print it:

Open an 11 x 8.5 landscape document.
Link all of your layers together. Click one of the boxes next to the layers and a paperclip will appear. That means those layers are linked.

Trim your document. (Image > Trim) This is important. This will make it easier to line everything up for printing. Use these settings:

Drag it onto the top left corner of the canvas. Don’t worry. It will be cut off, we are going to compensate for that.
Print it.
Now, drag it over to the top right corner of the canvas and send it to print again.

Now let’s put it together:

Trim off the bottom of each piece.
Line up the image.

Tape it together.

Cut out the circles.

Tape it to the can.

Add some ribbon to the handle if you want and Voila! You are done!

I use my paint can to bring chocolate covered pretzels into school for each holiday. For Halloween each year, we fill our paint can with Monster Fingers! They aren’t done yet, so I don’t have a picture. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and I will be happy to answer them. If you do happen to create one, I’d love for you to post a picture of it in the gallery.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this post! I hope you have a Happy Halloweeen!