Paint Bucket, and blends between foreground and background
colors. The length of the line you draw with the tool determines
how quickly the colors blend, even when you’re painting across
a selection, so keep it within the outline if you want both colors
represented. This can take some time, and will show up the
quality of your outlines and selections—you can always add
more if you need to, and tidy up the edges with the Eraser.5
UP THE NOISE
We’ve placed a new background layer behind our painted
people, on which there is a gradient blending between
two of our chosen colors. We’ve also used “Free Transform” to
slightly resize and rotate the faces so they’re the same size and
looking the same way. We used the Brush and Eraser, plus Magic
Wand in conjunction with “Clear” and “Content Aware Fill” to tidy
up areas where the colors didn’t quite meet together. Then we
added a noise layer over the top of everything by converting the
two faces into Smart Objects, then running “Filter > Noise >CAdd Noise” on them both [Image C]. By applying this as a
Smart Filter, we can edit it again later if we want.6
BACKGROUND AND MESSAGE
As a final touch, we’ve taken a photo of a summer
sky and placed it right at the top of the layer stack,
changing its blend mode to “Multiply.” Then, just above
the background layer, we’ve put a layer with a yellow
flash on it. Still keeping within our color scheme, we’ve
added a rectangle and some lettering, each going on a
separate layer. The text is right in front, so it’s not made
illegible by the blended photo.7
FINISHING TOUCHES
A quick crop to trim out the edges, and a final save
in PSD format, and our message to the populace
is ready to be hastily pasted on walls and store fronts all
over the nation [Image D].DIn order to get better vector paths for our selections, we
could have started in Adobe Illustrator, but according to
Adobe’s pricing plan, using that app would cost us three
times as much each month as it does to use Photoshop
and Lightroom together. So, assuming that most people
subscribe to the excellent value Photographer’s Bundle
instead of individual apps, we’ve kept it entirely within
Photoshop. By doing the selecting and gradient work in
Illustrator, we could have imported vector artwork into
Photoshop that could have been resized to anything we
had in mind. While we do a tiny bit of resizing here, we have
been careful not to increase the size of any elements too
dramatically, in order to avoid pixelation.VECTOR SELECTOR
maximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 67