Pages

Saturday, July 05, 2014

"See Yourself in the Temple" Silhouette: Faux Tutorial

We moved to Chandler three weeks ago to be closer to my new office. Same company, new location. For my final Sunday with my Laurels (my calling was pretty much the only thing I was sad to leave behind) I gave them these prints:



There were six total, one for each girl (using their own silhouettes and favorite temples) but this one turned out the best. You could say I am pretty damn impressed with myself. You can download it here on Mediafire, or follow my (very brief) instructions below to make your own. This isn't really a tutorial because I'm lazy and don't feel like teaching the whole internet how to use Photoshop, so for the rest of the post I assume a certain level of Photoshop experience, and link to other tutorials along the way. No need to reinvent the wheel here.

First you have to make the shape of the silhouette from a photo. Here's an explanation of one way to do that. (I personally used the Pen tool to create a vector shape, which allows more precision but does require some practice.)

Tracing a silhouette using the Pen tool.


Open a new 8x10 file in Photoshop, 300 pixels per inch (this is important since you'll be printing it), with a white background.

Create a new layer and place your silhouette. If you made a vector shape, fill it with any color. But pick a pretty one, just cuz.

Create a new layer and place the temple image of your choice.  Make sure it's high resolution.

Right click the temple layer and select "Create clipping mask." This will trim the temple picture to the shape of your silhouette. Resize and move the temple photo until you like the positioning.

Use the color picker tool to select a color from the palette of the image then create a new layer for the text. I used a typeface called "Orange" but can't for the life of me figure out where I got it from. 30 seconds of Googling didn't help so I gave up. ("This is the worst tutorial ever!!!!")

The completed layers will look like this:



Save as jpeg, print on 8.5x11 cardstock, trim down to 8x10, frame, kthxbai.

2 comments: