Tutorial 2: Cate Blanchett wallpaper for Photoshop 7
So normally, I’m not much of a tutorial writer, but I got asked how I did a couple of things on wallpapers, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Now I’ve never written a tutorial for wallpaper, mostly because I tend to do things in complete arse about face ways, I’m sure there are quicker ways to do things, I just don’t know them.
Please remember, this is just a guide. I really don’t want to be browsing communities and see six billion exact copies, because that would suck, and no one would be happy, least of all me.
I made this wall a while ago, and while I still have all the layers, I don’t remember the exact process I went through when I made it, so I’m just going to take you through the layers one by one as I have them.
First off, make a new canvas. I tend to start at 1024 x 768, because that’s what size my monitor displays at.
So, new canvas, and flood fill with any colour. For this I chose #F0E8B0 which is a sort of really pale beige. I usually start with a plain colour rather than a texture because I like fairly unobtrusive backgrounds, and it gives me something solid to muck about with later if I decide I want to change the tone of the piece.
Then I took this gorgeous texture by iconistas, plonked it on top of my flood fill layer and set it to normal. I think I originally had it on soft light, but play around with these things. The fact that I now can’t see my base layer doesn’t really matter; I can tweak bits as I want them, when I want to.
Then I got my picture, which is this lovely picture of Cate Blanchett (warning, large image), which I found on tinalikesstuff. I cropped it so that there wasn’t so much extra space, and plonked it onto my canvas, which was ok, but I thought it needed something doing to it.
So, I took several of teh_indy’s tape brushes, and made a border with them, in black, like this, and positioned it round the picture so that it was framed. Then I selected the border with the magic wand tool, hid the layer, and, making sure that the layer with Cate was selected, I went Layer>Add Layer Mask>Hide Selection, which gave me that nice jagged edge effect. Now I could have just used the eraser brush, but that would have been pretty terminal, and I like mucking about with these things and changing them, so I wanted the option of being able to undo the effect at any point.
Then I went and had a sandwich or something, probably. Seriously though, take breaks, come back and look at whatever it is you’re making with a fresh mind. It’ll do you the world of good.
So I came back to it and thought, hmm, that’s a really cool shape, let’s get some repetition in there.
So I duplicated the layer with Cate on, and then went Image>Free Transform. Making sure that I selected the maintain aspect ration button, I resized the picture and dragged it so that it was to the right of the main image.
There was still something missing, so, using the rectangular marquee tool I selected a couple of bits if Cate, and pasted them onto new layers, and resized them, arranging them as I felt looked right.
Then I decided that they needed to have the same rough edges as the other pictures. So, this time I did use the eraser, with one of teh_indy’s tape brushes selected and erased parts of the pictures until I was happy.
This is what I had at this point.
Next, I merged the picture layers together by hiding the background layers and selecting Layers>Merge Visible, and then unhiding the other layers. I then selected the area around them and inverted the selection so that the image was selected (see what I mean about doing things the hard way?)
I then created two new layers above this. Over the main image on the lower layer I flood filled with black, while over the three smaller images I flood filled with a dark blue. I set this layer to colour at 35%.
The layer above I flood filled with a beige colour, something along the lines of #E6D78F, and set this to multiply at 35%. These two steps are two I really like to give images a slightly richer tone.
I think I played around with an exclusion layer as well, but it’s all a matter of trial and error.
This is what the wallpaper looked like at this point.
After this, I started adding loads of textures to the background. This really is hit and miss, and I can’t necessarily explain my choices, so I’ll just give you a run through of the layers and settings.
The lowest layer is this texture from icons_with_love. I rotated it through 90º, and lowered the opacity to 75% so that it looked like this (only without the white background). I then duplicated it and played with the layer settings, eventually settling on Colour Burn at 35%.
The next one up is this texture from Tre. I stretched it so that it would fit, and used a similar masking method as the one I used for the edge of the main picture to roughen up the top and bottom edges which resulted in this. I left this at Normal, 100% opacity.
The third texture is this one by icons_with_love. Again, I rotated it by 90º. Initially I had cut it as a border, and placed it over the Cate layer so it looked like this, but I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted, so I moved it below the Cate layer and left it at Normal, 100%. I then duplicated it and set it to Multiply, also at 100% opacity.
This left me with this.
The next job was the text. I used some lyrics by Alanis Morissette from the song Spineless, because I thought that they fit the way that Cate was looking. Using the dropper tool I picked a colour from somewhere in the image, and that was the colour that I used, since I felt that that would blend in better than randomly picking a colour.
The font I used was Century, in sizes 24pt and 48pt. I rotated the text a bit to make it look more varied, and that was how I did my text.
I decided that the text needed some kind of underlining, so I took a squiggle brush from the_indy and applied that in the same colour as the text and applied it so that it overlapped one of the smaller Cate pictures, which, I felt, drew the wallpaper together.
I also applied this brush a further two times at the top of the piece, and set these two layers at Soft Light.
By this point it looked like this.
Now that looked pretty good, but it was still a bit bland, so the last thing that I did was take this texture by Gender and place it above all the other layers. I set this layer to Soft Light at 100% opacity. This looked good, but I thought it still looked a bit pale, so I duplicated the layer, and set it to Multiply at 40% opacity.
And there you have the finished piece.
If you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them, but as I said, I have an amazing knack for doing things in weird ways, that people who are far more familiar with the program could probably help you with.
Now I’ve never written a tutorial for wallpaper, mostly because I tend to do things in complete arse about face ways, I’m sure there are quicker ways to do things, I just don’t know them.
Please remember, this is just a guide. I really don’t want to be browsing communities and see six billion exact copies, because that would suck, and no one would be happy, least of all me.
I made this wall a while ago, and while I still have all the layers, I don’t remember the exact process I went through when I made it, so I’m just going to take you through the layers one by one as I have them.
First off, make a new canvas. I tend to start at 1024 x 768, because that’s what size my monitor displays at.
So, new canvas, and flood fill with any colour. For this I chose #F0E8B0 which is a sort of really pale beige. I usually start with a plain colour rather than a texture because I like fairly unobtrusive backgrounds, and it gives me something solid to muck about with later if I decide I want to change the tone of the piece.
Then I took this gorgeous texture by iconistas, plonked it on top of my flood fill layer and set it to normal. I think I originally had it on soft light, but play around with these things. The fact that I now can’t see my base layer doesn’t really matter; I can tweak bits as I want them, when I want to.
Then I got my picture, which is this lovely picture of Cate Blanchett (warning, large image), which I found on tinalikesstuff. I cropped it so that there wasn’t so much extra space, and plonked it onto my canvas, which was ok, but I thought it needed something doing to it.
So, I took several of teh_indy’s tape brushes, and made a border with them, in black, like this, and positioned it round the picture so that it was framed. Then I selected the border with the magic wand tool, hid the layer, and, making sure that the layer with Cate was selected, I went Layer>Add Layer Mask>Hide Selection, which gave me that nice jagged edge effect. Now I could have just used the eraser brush, but that would have been pretty terminal, and I like mucking about with these things and changing them, so I wanted the option of being able to undo the effect at any point.
Then I went and had a sandwich or something, probably. Seriously though, take breaks, come back and look at whatever it is you’re making with a fresh mind. It’ll do you the world of good.
So I came back to it and thought, hmm, that’s a really cool shape, let’s get some repetition in there.
So I duplicated the layer with Cate on, and then went Image>Free Transform. Making sure that I selected the maintain aspect ration button, I resized the picture and dragged it so that it was to the right of the main image.
There was still something missing, so, using the rectangular marquee tool I selected a couple of bits if Cate, and pasted them onto new layers, and resized them, arranging them as I felt looked right.
Then I decided that they needed to have the same rough edges as the other pictures. So, this time I did use the eraser, with one of teh_indy’s tape brushes selected and erased parts of the pictures until I was happy.
This is what I had at this point.
Next, I merged the picture layers together by hiding the background layers and selecting Layers>Merge Visible, and then unhiding the other layers. I then selected the area around them and inverted the selection so that the image was selected (see what I mean about doing things the hard way?)
I then created two new layers above this. Over the main image on the lower layer I flood filled with black, while over the three smaller images I flood filled with a dark blue. I set this layer to colour at 35%.
The layer above I flood filled with a beige colour, something along the lines of #E6D78F, and set this to multiply at 35%. These two steps are two I really like to give images a slightly richer tone.
I think I played around with an exclusion layer as well, but it’s all a matter of trial and error.
This is what the wallpaper looked like at this point.
After this, I started adding loads of textures to the background. This really is hit and miss, and I can’t necessarily explain my choices, so I’ll just give you a run through of the layers and settings.
The lowest layer is this texture from icons_with_love. I rotated it through 90º, and lowered the opacity to 75% so that it looked like this (only without the white background). I then duplicated it and played with the layer settings, eventually settling on Colour Burn at 35%.
The next one up is this texture from Tre. I stretched it so that it would fit, and used a similar masking method as the one I used for the edge of the main picture to roughen up the top and bottom edges which resulted in this. I left this at Normal, 100% opacity.
The third texture is this one by icons_with_love. Again, I rotated it by 90º. Initially I had cut it as a border, and placed it over the Cate layer so it looked like this, but I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted, so I moved it below the Cate layer and left it at Normal, 100%. I then duplicated it and set it to Multiply, also at 100% opacity.
This left me with this.
The next job was the text. I used some lyrics by Alanis Morissette from the song Spineless, because I thought that they fit the way that Cate was looking. Using the dropper tool I picked a colour from somewhere in the image, and that was the colour that I used, since I felt that that would blend in better than randomly picking a colour.
The font I used was Century, in sizes 24pt and 48pt. I rotated the text a bit to make it look more varied, and that was how I did my text.
I decided that the text needed some kind of underlining, so I took a squiggle brush from the_indy and applied that in the same colour as the text and applied it so that it overlapped one of the smaller Cate pictures, which, I felt, drew the wallpaper together.
I also applied this brush a further two times at the top of the piece, and set these two layers at Soft Light.
By this point it looked like this.
Now that looked pretty good, but it was still a bit bland, so the last thing that I did was take this texture by Gender and place it above all the other layers. I set this layer to Soft Light at 100% opacity. This looked good, but I thought it still looked a bit pale, so I duplicated the layer, and set it to Multiply at 40% opacity.
And there you have the finished piece.
If you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them, but as I said, I have an amazing knack for doing things in weird ways, that people who are far more familiar with the program could probably help you with.