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Graphic Design
Manipulating my image - Part Two
Where to go after part one? I was thinking about having a go at something a bit more 'grungy' than I have tackled before.
I remembered that I had my festival hat. Yes, I know, but it keeps the sun off and has some amusing badges on it for good luck. Substantial headwear is a must for every festival goer, unless of course you enjoy sunstroke, dehydration or a good soaking! The idea was to use the hat and develop my own take on the old Uncle Sam 'I Want You' poster. I also have a t-shirt with the U.S. flag on it.
Once the photo was taken against a plain background I got to work with cutting the image out to make it ready for adding to whatever poster design I came up with. I wanted the poster itself to look like it had been around quite some time. Trust me, there are thousands of Photoshop tuorials on how to make something look aged and I started to trawl a few of my favourite tutorial sites to try a few out. I settled on using the lasso tool to cut out small, random sections of the rectangle I had created an inner and outer glow effect to get the yellowing effect on the edges.
Next I took my cutout image and applied it to the poster background. With a little bit of fiddling with the blending options I managed to get it to look like it had always been there. I was pretty pleased with what I had achieved so far. The front of the t-shirt I was wearing had something different on it but I fancied adding a hand grenade motif just to hammer home the army theme. The hand grenade itself was a shape I had downloaded in Photoshop and I used some of the free transform tools to mould it into place.
The fun part was going to be grunging the whole thing up...a lot. I created the background wall effect with a textured tile pattern overlay. It is very rare that I use any of the preset patterns that CS2 comes with but this seemed perfect as a starting point. A dark rectangle was then placed over the top of the pattern and reduced in opacity until it had darkened the pattern to just the right 'dingy' grey. Once I was happy with the background wall I transferred the poster onto it.
Next with the grunge brushes. Just enough cracks, splats, cuts and grazes to blend the whole thing together and make it look like it had been on the wall for years. I also added some hand written graffiti on the poster. Nothing sophisticated but as if someone had just got bored and decided to scrawl on the poster. I also added the 'I Want You' text and the phone number underneath. Although I am from the U.K. I have seen U.S. phone numbers which, when translated onto the corresponding letters on a telephone keypad, spell a word. '1-800-CORROSIVE' seemed ideal!
I had one last idea to have the bottom right hand corner of the poster curl up a little. This was done by adding a very close drop shadow. I transformed the shadow into it's own layer and then used the free transform and warp options on Photoshop to curl the corner of the actual poster. This left the separate drop shadow layer behind and created the desired effect.
Click on image to view large version (Lightbox)
It might be a little while before I do one of these again as they are pretty self-indulgent but I learnt a lot of new techniques doing this poster.
