Abstract Digital Collages in Adobe Photoshop

1. Introduction: Hey guys, welcome to my Skillshare class. I'm a musician, but coming from a graphic design background, my favorite part after finishing a song is designing an illustrating the covers. In this course, I'll show you how I designed cover art for my musical projects. Great cover art is essential to the listening experience. It can convey the general aesthetic and vibe of the song, as well as give your listeners some pleasant eye candy. My approach to design is to have fun, experiment and come up with ideas as I go. We will be working in Adobe Photoshop, and I'll show you various image manipulation techniques that I've gathered over the years, like 3D filters, blending modes, texts, defects, adding noise and more. In this course, we'll be taking a closer look at these two images I've made. I'll walk you through the steps of making these kinds of images. So after finishing this course, you'll be able to make your own. Let's get started. 2. Case Study 1: I'm going to start this edit with an image of the main character from the 990s eight sci-fi anime series of experiments lane. Under Effects 3D, I will generate the normal map, which gives any 2D image a cool purple 3D VHS effect. I'm using a large soft eraser to blend it in with the background. In the Layers menu, I'm going to change the blending mode. Usually I don t know which one of the blending modes I'm going to end up using. So I just go through all of them and find the one that looks the best for my taste. I like the pose of this character. I think it will fit nicely in the foreground. With the lasso tool. I'll cut out a rough silhouette and press Control J to duplicate my selection to a new layer. Let's go through the blending modes again and see what works the best. I like how the lightened blending mode looks with this background. It is very important to balance the various elements in your image. With this image. I'm just dragging it around and resizing it until I find the best place where it fits in with the other elements in my composition. Sometimes an idea won't work out no matter how much you try to adjust it, then the best option is just to delete it and try out the different idea. Now, I want to add a cool-looking Japanese car. I really liked the smoke effect on this one. Again, using the soft eraser to fade it in and changing the blending mode, this time to soft light and using the move tool to adjust its position and size. Now I'll try to add some text. You can change the font up here and the best place to get new fonts for free is duff font.com. I'll be using a cool pixel art typeface called upheaval. You can add effects to your text. Down here. I'll be adding Outer Glow gradient effect. Here. I'm just playing with the opacity, spread and size sliders to get the effect to look just how I want it to. Bevel and emboss will add a 3D effect to your text. It's already looking pretty cool, but I want to take it further and experiment by messing around with the text. I'm pressing Control D to duplicate the text and create repetition in the image. I'm selecting all of the texts layers and pressing Control E to merge them into a single rasterized layer. I can duplicate, Move, and Transform. From this point, I won't be able to change the text properties because now the text is just rasterized pixels. Let's try a different blending modes. I like the green that comes with a different blending mode. I'm adjusting the hue, saturation and value of the layer by pressing Control U. I feel like adding a vinyl record. Using the magic wand tool. I'll select and delete the white from my image. While holding down Shift, I'll click and select all of my layers and press Control E to merge them into a single image layer. While holding down the Alt key, I'll click between the layers to apply a clipping mask. Now it takes the shape of a vinyl record. Now I'll be adding a background image. I think Tokyo at night will be a great fit. But it looks kinda flat. So I want to create separation between the foreground and the background. First to make the foreground pop out, add an outer glow effect. I'll make the foreground even more saturated and synthetic. Looking. Here, I wanted to see how it would look as a square shape, but I liked the round shape better. But I'll rotate this layer diagonally and try to use it as an overlay layer to add some texture and make the image more dynamic. It doesn't look the way I wanted it to, so I'll turn its visibility off. I want to make the background a bit darker. So I'll create a new layer and fill it with pure black and lower its opacity over here. Up here in the filter menu, there are different types of blur. The best option to use his Guassian blur because you can control the amount of blur you want. Now, there's a clear separation between the bright, sharp and saturated foreground and the darker, blurrier, more faded background. Play around with a soft eraser to make the background less evenly dark to add some dynamics. Cool, I think the image is finished. Now, I'll save it as a PNG or JPEG file and click, okay, here we have our finished result. I think it would be a nice cover image for a synthetic techno or a drum and bass song. 3. Case Study 2: I'm going to start off with this super cute smiling Labrador. For this image, I don't have a general idea, so I'll just add some random images of the top of my head and see what happens. The difference blending mode makes it look very creepy, but I loved the colors that brings out up here under Edit adjustments, I'll invert the colors and try to add the Zelda forest image again for a different effect. Let's see how the forest will look as a background. Next up, I want to add a ferry. The process is quite straightforward. You come up with an idea, play around with composition, blending modes, and the layer structure. It's always a good idea to add mushrooms. Here, I flipped the image horizontally. The shortcut for transforming is Control T, and you can right-click on it to see its options. I'm using the soft eraser to fade the edges and blending it in with the background using the Pin Light blending mode. I want to add some abstract art elements, so add a visual composition by the 20th century abstract artists, Wassily Kandinsky. It adds some nice geometric shapes and the rhythms to the piece. Now, I'll merge all the layers together by pressing the shortcut Control E and adjust the hue saturation by pressing the shortcut control, you adjusted colors now make it look like an underwater scene. So my next idea is to add a C diverse suit and then to overlay it with a water texture. The image is not finished yet, but here I'll save it because I like how it looks at the moment. Difference is probably my favorite blending mode. It inverts the colors in the light parts of the image. And it always produces some weird and super cool effect. As always, I'm using the magic one tool to quickly delete the background. Now, I'm going to add some particle effects, set it to a hard light blending mode, lower the opacity and adjust the levels by pressing the shortcut Control L. Next, I want to add some organic textures. So I chose this acrylic pour painting, which looks really interesting. It completely changes the look of the image and the color is looking credible source, save this version and keep going further. I want to keep some aspects of the last image, so I'll erase a little bit just enough to show the math and the sea diver. For me, making this kind of an image is sort of like painting, but you can express your ideas so much quicker. And the process is incredibly fun because you get to see how the image is always changing before your eyes. Also, it's impossible to ruin your image because you can always go back or change your idea to take a different direction. In my experience, usually the best art comes out when I'm just experimenting and messing around without any concrete idea or expectations of the outcome. I love adding these kinds of botanical or enter my logical illustrations. I think it's interesting to experiment with making art at different times of the day. I did this particular piece at five in the morning. And I feel that ideas that come out when you haven't slept for awhile are usually much weirder and more creative. So if you're making something technical where you have to focus and be precise, it's better to do it in the morning. But stuff like this where you're just expressing your ideas and experimenting is usually better done at the evenings or in the nighttime, because at that point, the brain is less active and the analytical part of the brain doesn't interfere with the subconscious creative part, which is free to express itself. I'll bring the giant wasp to the foreground and add a rainbow gradient outer glow effect. This honeycomb effect isn't really working. Saw deleted and merge the rest of the layers using the shortcut Control E and try out a different Honeycomb image. Here, I set it to a hue blending mode, and it's unified all of the colors very nicely. Now, it looks like everything in this image exists in the world submerged in honey or encapsulated within an amber stone illuminated by golden light. I think this is it. I'll try to add another water texture and set it to a saturation blending mode, which makes the final image a bit more saturated and lively. Now I'll save it. And I think this piece will be called the world within an amber stone. 4. Final Thoughts: I hope you enjoyed watching the process of making these edits as much as I enjoyed making them. Now, I encourage you to try to make your own. And if you do, I'd be really happy to see them uploaded to the projects and resources tab. Also check out my other Skillshare classes. Thanks for watching.