The makings of a wallpaper

For my first real post I will show you what I did yesterday.
Someone gave me a picture and said they want a wallpaper that will resemble that.

So , here's the picture –

it's from TED talk on .... well you guessed it :What leads to success

First things first .
I opened PS and made ( the simplest thing you can do ) a black background :). Then I needed some human shapes like in the picture so I started googling. Unfortunately I came up empty handed so I had to do them from scratch.

At first I thought it would be difficult but soon realized that it was not the case. Here's how I did it :

I used ellipse tool for drowning the head and rounded rectangular tool for the rest of the body. Remember to put each part in separate layers so you can transform them, see for example, right hand in this picture. With rectangular tool you only can draw straight objects.


For the box I used rectangular tool, I draw 3 squares, each one in separate layers, like this :


On the squares marked with 2 and 3 I used Transform – Distort. While you distort it press and hold SHIFT key so that your shape will have a straight line. (use the shift key even if you only want to use Free Transform, so that you constrain proportions or whenever you draw straight lines) In this image the red lines you see is the rulers (ctrl + r or view - rulers) I used to position the squares with precision.

And this is the simple box :


Now select those 3 layers pressing down the CTRL key and then then press CTRL + E to merge layers into one layer so that you can easily move it around or apply effects to it.

All you have to do now is double click on the layer to open layer style and play around with them until you have the result you want.



With the heart shape was easier. I just used a custom shape and applied the step above.

And then I had to make the hammer. I thought I could use a custom shape again but I didn’t find what I want so I started googling again. I found an image with a hummer, this one and I transformed in brush by selecting it and go to Edit- Define brush preset. And then again I applied a style on it.

For the Focus image I used this and then transformed
into brush like I did with the hammer. The star is a custom shape, too.

For the Ideas I used these 2 custom shape :


The picture bellow is what it was looking like in version 0.1 beta :). Not exactly nice, and the client wasn't very happy with it. ( That success in the middle does look like something out of the 90s.)


Then I played with layers style and I came up with :


The problem was that the client said the shapes looked like they were some kind of balloons or something and the "Success" word was really fugly :)

After that I thought to make smaller icons and to put them around the “success”. So .. using a circle and the rulers I did this : ) . For the “success” word I just typed in and then I played again with layer style.

And the final version of my wallpaper :



This is what I ended up with. The client was reasonably happy with it :) .. and for a beginner I happen to think it's pretty good .

Hope you enjoyed this little tutorial, and there's more to come .

Design with passion.