Recreating Origins

What we will be making today is a general recreation of my most recent digital work, Origins. It will be made in Adobe Photoshop. I am using CS4, but it should be clear enough for earlier versions of it.

A little bit of history:

I had all day to myself, so I decided I'd quit being lazy and do some work. I hadn't done any of this abstract style in a long time so I said, "Let's just get to it!" I used many different images and many different effects (no 3D involved at all), and about 8 hours. We will do it in a much shorter time span.

Well, let's begin!

First things first, we need images to use! Obviously you can't just run around the web grabbing all the images you like and creating a collage. That's illegal. Now, if you use stock images, that's another story. Stock images are usually not free, but I now my stock images. Here's where I usually go:

http://www.sxc.hu/

This site has a plethora of free, high-resolution stock images ready for your use. I usually will skim through day to day saving images I think could be cool in a work. Note:  You do need to create an account for the website in order to download the full images. It is free and really easy to do.

Here's the images I used:

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/563435

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/227982

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/574371

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1178699

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1162777

Save all of these images and we can begin.

Were going to now open a new Photoshop document. Open up your copy of Photoshop and hit Cmd/Ctrl - N. Change the width to 2000 pixels and the height to 1500 pixels. Make sure the resolution is at 300 and color mode is RGB. Choose white as the background color and hit Ok.

The first thing we need to do is get the feather into our document. Go to File - Place... Select the feathers image and hit OK. We then need to change its color. Go to Image - Adjustments - Hue/Saturation. Change the First slider (Hue) to -40 and the Saturation to 75.

This will give us the blues and reds that look so cool. Feel free to make it whatever color combination you want, I just like the blue/red contrast. It's really my favorite and you'll see it in a lot of my work.

Now, go online and download any of these brushes that look like good, thick paint splats:

http://naldzgraphics.net/freebies/350-ultimate-free-spray-and-splatter-paint-brushes/

Yes there's a ton of them but yours won't look like mine anyways. When you download them just unzip the files or open them up and you'll see an .abr file of some sort. Just double click it and it will automatically import it into your brushes panel.

Go into Photoshop, go to Window - Brushes. Choose the eraser tool and pick a good splat brush. Click near the edge of the image. Do this several times with many diferent brushes so there isn't a solid edge anymore.

Well, that's all for now, part 2 coming soon!