Hello Champions I m Renée and once again I am bringing you a Daydreamer or Fantasy style tutorial. Fantasy style pages come about from kits that contain certain elements like cars, treasure chests, furniture and the like. The papers normally contain scenes and this lends itself to surrealistic pages, manipulations that look as if it s a photo or fantasy pages that has that storybook feel. Last November I showed you how to create a night scene and this time we will build a page that reflects both an above the sea and under the sea scenes after I saw all the lovely elements in the kit that Hollie from Holliewood Studios has once again provided us with. This kit is perfect for all those summer and beach photos you all have been taking. Imagine a page where your kiddo swims with a mermaid. And I have to mention that I m super jealous as we re just coming out of winter here in South Africa. That s why I sound a bit croaky as I have a slight chest cold. The beauty of this kit is that the colors match well and we won t need to make lots of adjustment layers to match colors like we did in last year s page. For this tutorial I m also using an element from the kit as my photo as I don t do the beach at all and have nothing appropriate. Therefore I won t be extracting anything, but of course you are more that welcome to use your own photos and extracting them in your preferred method. I also have to mention that due to the style of some of the elements in this kit, we are creating a definite fantasy page as opposed to a realistic looking manipulation. Outer space is the limit with fantasy pages I have added some bubble brushes to the resources that I found on Deviantart that are by Jennyle88. I will be showing you how to set up the scene How to use the clone stamp tool How to use the liquefy filter And how to create depth of field.
Let s get started. Open a new 12x12 page. Open ShineOn_Paper22 Hold down the shift key and drag it into your blank canvas. Open ShineOn_Paper17 and drag that into a new layer. Toggle the visibility of this layer off for now. Open the coral reef element in the first elements folder in the kit and place it on a new layer between the 2 papers. Reposition it to the bottom of the page. Move it down that most of the black under the yellow coral is hidden. Tip : Using your arrow keys will nudge it perfectly into place. This comes in handy if you have an element that fits perfectly from side to side or top to bottom. Toggle the visibility of the scenic paper back on and ensure this layer is active. The dark underwater mass of rocks or kelp on the left hand side of the page is really bothering me. I would like the look of the water on the right hand side to be repeated across the page as we want our mermaid to be swimming in deep sea. There s several ways this can be done. We could make a selection of the right hand side of the page, copy it and masking to blend, but of course the areas aren t the same size and this won t work. We could mask it out with brushes, but then we still don t have the waves coming across the entire scene. This is where the clone stamp tool comes in. The clone stamp copies an area and as you paint with it, it will recreate the sample area and it s surrounds. Create a new layer. Click on the clone stamp tool and change its size that it is fairly large. Use your squared brackets for this. Make sure that Current and Below is selected. Hold down the Alt/Opt key and sample an area you want to copy and click on an area you want to cover. Work from right to left, sampling from the good area and covering what needs to change. Be careful not to click on the edge of the page when sampling as you will end up with hard edges in your new cloned area. It s also not necessary to clone right down to the bottom of the page as we need to remove some of it for our deep sea and coral to be visible. Just ensure that you clone good areas across the page.
Go back to the paper layer and with The Marquee Tool selected make a selection of the bottom of the page. Make sure you select slightly higher than the bottom of your cloned areas. Once you re happy with your selection you can delete. Right click on the clone layer and Merge Down. This sets our scene and concludes the first part of our tutorial. PART 2 Let s get ready to have some fun on our page. Open the Mermaid element and drag her into a new layer. Oh dear, she really looks odd floating on top of everything. Time to play a bit. Go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal. Hold down the Ctrl/Cmmd key to call up the transform function and while holding the shift key resize the mermaid. Her tail is so pretty and I think it would look even better if it was bigger. This is where the Liquify Filter will come in handy. The Liquify Filter can be daunting and used incorrectly it can mess things up terribly, but with patience, a bit of practice and a gentle hand, this is a lovely tool. The liquefy tool grabs the selected area and drags it out to a cut off point that s determined by the brush size. Have you ever seen images of melted cameras and warped watches and wondered how it was done? The artist used the liquefy tool to create the effect. Go to Filter > Liquify Toggle Show Backdrop On
Click on the Forward Warp Tool. Change the brush size to 200 and slowly start dragging the smaller points on the tail out. Change the brush size to 320 and do the same on the outside points of the tail. Once you re happy click OK. Let s have a look at this technique again. Marvelous, but she s still sitting on top of the page and not swimming!!!!! We want to keep her arm above water. Using the pen tool carefully select parts of her arm and hand that goes over her tail and fin. Right click and make selection. Click Ctrl/Cmmd J to make a copy. Ensure the mermaid layer is active and add a layer mask. Using a soft round brush, foreground color black, mask out areas around her tummy and tail to create the illusion that she is in the water. Now that she s swimming, the color of her body that s under the water just doesn t look right. Let s create some depth and correct the color by creating a new layer above the mermaid. Fill this layer with solid color #126b77 (which I sampled from the bottom paper) and change the opacity of this layer to 37%. Apply a layer mask and mask out the color above the water line. Now we have our mermaid happily swimming in the sea and need to finish the rest of the scene to bring it all together. We will cover this in Part 3. PART 3 Time to finish our scene. We re going to add our final elements and create more depth to our scene. Depth of field is achieved by the size of elements, blur and dodging and burning. A bird that if flying far off in the distance is not as distinct as one close by. The same applies for elements in our peripheral vision.
Open the image of the lady that s walking away in the first elements folder of the kit and place her on a new layer. Resize her and place her on the rocks. Create a new layer below her and with a small soft round brush, foreground color black, Opacity 100% and Flow 10%, paint a contact shadow under her feet. Open the seagull image and place it on the page. Duplicate it 3 times. Move the top copy to the extreme left side of the page. Ctrl/Cmmd T and rotate it slightly. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and change the value to 7. Resize the next copy and leave as is. Resize the remaining 2 copies so that they are both smaller and rotate them and apply a Gaussian Blur of 5 to each. This creates distance and depth of field as well. Go down to the coral layer and add some fish to the scene. Resize them to be the appropriate size. Load the Bubble Brushes Click on the Brush Tool. Click on the Drop Down on the top left of the panels. Click on the Drop Down Arrow and choose Load Brushes, find the ABR brush file in the resources and click OK. Choose one of the brushes and Change the Brush Setting by clicking on the icon that looks like a cup filled with paintbrushes. Tick > Shape Dynamics, Scattering and Smoothing Click on Brush Tip Shape and enter these values Size : 16px Angle : 0% Roundness : 100% Spacing : 192%
Click on Shape Dynamics and enter these values Minimum Diameter : 14% Angle Jitter : 46% Roundness Jitter : 18% Minimum Roundness : 25% Click on Scattering and enter these values Count : 1 Count Jitter ; 0% Create a new layer above the fish, foreground color white, paint some bubbles upward from the fish mouths. Change the opacity of this layer 10 52%. Now we just have to create our final depth layer by dodging and burning our image. Create a new layer at the top of the stack. Go to Edit > Fill and choose 50% Grey. Change the Blend Mode of this layer to Overlay. With the Burn Tool start darkening areas and do the same with the Dodge Tool. And that s our fantasy scene done. Hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. BONUS VIDEO
In keeping with the fantasy look, I wanted to show you how you can make your child or model s eyes bigger. Make a selection around the one eye using the Polygonal Lasso Tool. Cntrl?Cmmd J to copy. Repeat the process for the other eye. Select the copy of the right eye. Ctrl/Cmmd J to bring up the Transform Tool. The handles of the transform tool are called Vertex. Drag the centre vertex down to the left hand bottom vertex. Hold down the Shift key and drag the top right vertex up and out slightly. Rotate the eye slightly. Do the same for the left eye by reversing the direction, example drag the centre vertex down to the bottom right hand vertex. Remember to keep the eyes the same relative size. Reposition the eyes to fit under the eyebrows. Merge these 2 layers by activating the top layer, right click and Merge Down. Apply a Layer Mask to this layer and with a small soft round brush, foreground color black, Opacity 33%, Flow 33%, blend the new eyes into the background by removing anything that doesn t blend in well. And just like that you have bigger eyes that pop.