Difficulty Level: Medium
What You Need:
> Flash-enabled browser
> Source images: "There is Light," by Bluberries Advertising; "Fountain of the Neptune in Rome," by Hedda Gjerpen; and "Jet Stream," by Emma McCleary, all downloadable from aviary.com/artists/meowza/creations/in_the_clouds_-_maclife
I love spending my afternoons peacefully lying in a field, staring up at the sky and looking at the figures and formations my mind conjures up from the clouds, from cats to dragons to my boss’s face asking me what the heck I’m doing lying in a field and not in the office on a Monday afternoon. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create your own images within cloud formations without ever having to leave your desk. We’ll use Phoenix, Aviary.com’s Web-based image editor, which is akin to Adobe Photoshop but doesn’t require you to install any software.
Stunning. And easier than you'd think to create. (Click to embiggen)
To follow this tutorial in Phoenix, just visit Aviary.com and launch Phoenix directly from the site. To view the final image with all the layers intact, visit the image-creation page on Aviary at aviary.com/artists/meowza/creations/in_the_clouds_-_maclife and select Open In Phoenix to open the working file.
For more tutorials, visit the Tutorials section at Aviary.com, or check out Aviary’s tutorial book More Than One Way to Skin a Cat (by yours truly) at your local bookstore or on Amazon.com.
To begin, I launched Phoenix from Aviary.com, selected “Load existing file” from the splash screen, and uploaded my image of the clouds. I chose an image with a lot of well-defined edges on the clouds, which helps in assembling the figure.
Next I imported my photo of Neptune’s statue into my existing document, which is the image I based the cloud formation around. Photos of statues work well for this type of image, because they usually have strong contrasting lights and shadows and well-defined details. To import my second image, I selected File > Import File from Phoenix’s menubar and uploaded the photo of Neptune the same way I uploaded my original photo of the clouds. As an aside, I flipped the image horizontally so it flows from left to right (Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal, for each layer), which is a personal preference and not a necessary step.
The next step is to decide where I want the formation to appear. First, I desaturated the figure: With the layer of the statue selected, I chose Image > Desaturate to remove all color values from the layer. Then I temporarily lowered the Alpha--that is, the opacity--of the layer from the Layers Menu to 50%, so that I could see the clouds layer directly beneath, while I decided where to place the figure. I selected the Transformation Tool, dragged the figure to the open area of the sky in the upper-right area of the image, and slightly resized it by dragging a corner “handle” on the bounding box of the Transformation Tool to make the figure smaller. Double-click in the Transformation box to confirm the change.
