Today we begin a new series of tutorials on Using Digital Collage Sheets in your art. We’ll be starting off by showing you how to manipulate the images on a digital collage sheet using some basic Photoshop tools to make a simple art trading card (aka, ATC or ACEO) sized collage suitable for printing and trading. In future lessons, we’ll also be showing you how to blend bits and pieces together to make something new (eg, how to trade the head from one photo to another), as well as how to colorize black and white photos digitally. Not all of our future tutorials will be Photoshop based, but since the collage sheets are digital in nature I thought it might be the best place to start.

Materials needed:
Adobe Photoshop or a similair graphics editting program
this free digital collage sheet full of source images

This tutorial was designed using our collection of source images and Adobe Photoshop CS3, but almost any relatively recent version of Photoshop should have the same tools and menus available. If you don’t have a copy of Photoshop handy, we recommend the free image editting software Paint.NET as it offers much of the same functionality as Photoshop.

Let’s begin! To start, download the supplied digital collage sheet and save it somewhere you can find it.

Open Photoshop and create a New document (click File, then New) and use the following settings.

Width: 3.5 inches
Height: 2.5 inches
Resolution: 300 dpi
Color Mode: RGB Color, 8-bit
Background Contents: White

This should create a new untitled project, a blank rectangular image with a white background. Great! We now have our canvas. Let’s go get some pictures! Click the File menu and choose Open, then browse to wherever you saved the digital collage sheet. Select it and press Open. It should display in Photoshop in another window next to our blank canvas.

Wonderful! Let’s start by putting our background onto the blank canvas. To do this, we’ll want our Rectangular Marquee Tool (or Selection tool).

With the Marquee Tool selected, click on the open digital collage sheet image to give it focus. I’ve chosen to use the sepia toned street photo at the bottom as our background, so we’ll start there. Your mouse cursor should resemble a + symbol. Move the + to one corner of the picture, then click and drag to outline a box around the street scene we’ll be using.

Move back to the toolbar and choose the Move Tool (black arrow at the top).

Hover over the area of the picture that we outlined previously (it should now be outlined with a dotted line). Now simply drag & drop the selection over onto our blank canvas.

Alright! We’re on our way The street scene should now be on your previously blank canvas. Go ahead and move it around (left click and drag) until you have it where you’d like it.

Now we’ll go through the same steps with the rest of our chosen source images. One by one, outline them with the Marquee Tool and then move them from the collage sheet to our new canvas. These are the images I chose to use, which we’ll be using in the rest of the tutorial:

. . .

You should now have several images piled on top of each other on our new canvas.

Perfect! Well, at least for now Let’s start by straightening this poor girl out some…

On the right hand side of your screen you should see the Layer palette. The Layer palette is how we organize our images within the canvas. Layers are arranged from Front to Back and Top to Bottom. What I mean by this is that the bottom most layer (in this case the white Background Layer) is the furthest back in the image (the white background lies behind the street scene we placed). The ability to manipulate layers is one of the great things about Photoshop (and Paint.NET), allowing you to order the images & place them in front of or behind one another.

 Click the layer with our poor sideways girl (each layer should have a tiny thumbnail of the image it contains & will hopefully be easy to spot). This should highlight that layer.

From the upper menu, click Edit, then highlight Transform and choose Rotate 90° CCW (counter clockwise). This should reorient the image so that the girl is standing properly.

So far, so good? Great! Go ahead and Close the digital collage sheet file, we’re done with it for now. If it asks you to Save changes, tell it No.

Now we’re going to need to start cleaning up the individual images we pulled onto the canvas. We’ll begin by temporarily turning off the layers and working with them one by one. To do this, click the tiny Eye symbol next to each layer in the Layer palette. Turn off all of the layers except for the white Background layer.

Now, we should be back to our blank white canvas. Click on the Background Layer in the Layer palette so that it’s highlighted as shown.

At the bottom of the Layer palette, you’ll see various buttons. Click the Create New Layer button (it’s sort of square and usually sits next to the trash can icon). This will create a new blank layer above our white background. The new layer should be highlighted automatically – if not, go ahead and click it once to select it.

From your toolbar, select the Paint Bucket.

Set your Foreground color to Black if it isn’t already. The easiest way to do this is to click the Default Foreground and Background Colors button shown below.

Click once on the new layer to fill it with black.

Go ahead and turn off the visibility for the new Black background layer. Why did I have you do that? It’s going to help us clean up our images & avoid messy extraneous pixels. We’ll be checking our progress on both the Black and White backgrounds, allowing us to see stray light and dark pixels respectively.

You’re now ready to begin cleaning up your source images. Click the eye next to the layer with the guy flexing his muscle on it to make it visible once more. Now that it’s visible, we want to remove everything from the image except for the guy showing off his muscles. You could try this with the Eraser tool… But the Eraser tool can cause all sorts of headaches when you make mistakes, so I’m going to show you another of Photoshop‘s exciting features; masking! Masking performs “non-destructive” editting, meaning that if we accidentally remove too much of the image we can adjust it with ease. What masking does is allow you to hide (or show) elements by painting them out (or in). I don’t know as to Paint.NET’s abilities in this regard, so you folks may be stuck cleaning with the Eraser or have to track down and learn addons/plugins… If you’re lucky enough to have Photoshop, here’s how masking works.

Make sure that the correct image Layer is highlighted in the Layer Pallete.

At the bottom of the Layer palette, among the many little buttons, is a dark grey square with a white circle in the center. This is the Add Layer Mask button. Click it one time and a white box should appear beside the thumbnail on the Layer palette.

Click the white box itself to make sure it has focus, otherwise we’ll end up painting over the actual picture which isn’t what we want to do. Make sure your foreground color is set to Black and select a decent sized paintbrush.

I’ll be using a 90px brush with the Hardness set to 0%. You’ll want to experiment with sizes and Hardness settings to see what works best for you.

Start painting over the frame and background, outlining the man himself as well as you can.

Don’t worry about being too neat & don’t worry if you accidentally mask more than you mean to. As you can see below, I did a fairly messy job and I also cut off a bit of his head and one of his arms. No problem

Simply switch your Foreground color to White (use the Switch Foreground & Background Colors button on the toolbar to flip them quickly) and when you start painting you’ll be showing what you’ve hidden (masked) with the black paint.

Great! Now my guy’s still a bit messy, so I’m going to switch back to Black, Zoom In (you can use CTRL + to zoom in and CTRL - to zoom out, or you can go to View -> Zoom In or View -> Zoom Out respectively), and choose a smaller brush so that I can clean up the mess I’ve left. Here I’ve zoomed the image to 200% and am using a 25px brush to clear away the haze surrounding our character. Scroll down and around the picture, cleaning away the excess pixels as well as you can, leaving just the person.

When you’re done hiding the excess pixels, your character may be a bit fuzzy, hazy or partially transparent in places. I recommend switching the Foreground color back to White and going back over the character’s outline from the inside, unmasking the edges and redifining the lines. You’ll likely have to flip flop between black and white a few times to get it all just so, but the end result should look something like the image above.

Turn the visibility on the Black background layer back on & see if you have any excess light colored pixels to clean up. If so, mask them with black.

Wonderful! Turn the visibility off on the black background layer again and turn on the visibility on the next character. Here’s the one I chose to do next:

Now this image is larger than we need it to be for this collage, so we’ll want to scale it down some. You can do this by selecting Edit, then Transform, and finally Scale.

This should create a box around the image with small squares at the corner edges. Hold down the SHIFT key and drag one of the corner squares in towards the center of the picture. (NOTE: Make sure you’re holding down SHIFT when you do this or you’ll end up squashing or stretching your image out of shape. Also, make sure you’re dragging the CORNER squares and not one of the side/center ones.) Size it down so that it’s about 1/2 the size of the muscle man.

When you have it where you want it, click the Move Tool on the Toolbar (or any tool actually) and you will be asked if you want to “Apply the transformation“. Click Apply and the image will stay the size you shrank it to (Cancel will return you to Scaling the image and Don’t Apply will return it to it’s prior size). Add a Layer Mask to this layer & hide the unwanted pixels just as you did before. When you’re done, you should have something like this:

Awesome! You’re getting good at this Now go ahead and clean up the remaining two character images and you should have something like this:

Still with me so far? Alright! Now make your street scene background visible again by clicking the eye (or the empty box where the eye should be). Hopefully it looks something like this:

Still good? Wonderful Now let me quickly show you how to arrange your layer palette. We want the street scene background to be at the back of the image, so it needs to be on the bottom of the stack of images. If it’s not there already, drag the layer down in the Layer Palette until it’s just above the Black background layer then let it go. Next is our muscle man, so move his layer down until it’s just above the street background. Since they won’t be overlapping, the order of the ladies doesn’t matter so much as long as they’re placed above mister muscle there. Here’s how my Layer palette looks:

Something else you can do to make your life easier is to label the layers. Instead of simply calling them Layer 1, 2, 3, etc., you can double-click the text on the Layer palette and type in whatever you’d like. This is really helpful for large projects! (NOTE: Double-clicking elsewhere on the layer palette will bring up the Layer Style menu, so make sure you’re right over the text when you double click).

Alright, so we have our scenery and our cast of characters. Places everyone! Time to move them all into position. First, let’s put Mr. Muscles right in the middle of the scene. Click his Layer in the Layer Palette and, using the Move Tool, drag him into position. Move him down so that his lack of legs isn’t noticeable, like so:

The girls are still a bit larger than we need them to be for this image, so scale them down (Edit, Transform, Scale) one by one until their heads are just about shoulder level to Mr. Muscles. All good so far? Terrific! Now let’s put the ladies into position. First, let’s move the girl with the flower into place so that she covers the damaged looking area on Mr. Muscle’s arm (left side of the screen). Now she looks like she’s offering him the flower

Wonderful! Now let’s move the “swooning” girl (the color one from the painting) over to the left hand side of the screen. We want to change the way she’s facing, so click Edit, then Transform, and choose Flip Horizontal from the menu.

She should now look like so:

We also want to change the direction the girl pointing her finger is facing, so choose her Layer in the Layer Palette, then click Edit, Transform, and Flip Horizontal. Move her to the right side of Mr. Muscles so that she covers the damaged area of that arm. Your image should now look like this:

Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far you now know enough of the basics of Photoshop to create simple collages & have just made a digital art trading card suitable for printing. Be sure to click File and Save your project as a Photoshop PSD file, in case you want to play with it some more or look at it for reference. If you’d like a printable copy or just a high quality copy on your hard drive, click File and select Save As, then save your file as a JPEG with quality setting 12. If you want a lower quality copy suitable for emailing, posting on the web, etc., then click File and choose Save for Web. I recommend choosing the JPEG settings here as well and usually save at about 60% quality for net use.

With some experimentation, you’re likely to discover all sorts of other amazing things – so get busy, push some buttons & see what happens! Explore, and above all have fun!

The next tutorial I have planned will show you how to blend images together seemlessly to create new characters and elements. Keep your eyes here!

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