Lesson #17 - Making a Plaid Background

This is an Advanced Tutorial, but if you are up to date with Beginner Lessons 1-8 you should be able to complete this Tutorial - Advanced #17 - Making a Plaid Background.

Make sure that you have your Layer Palette open and open a new image 300 x 300 transparent at least 200 dpi. You may want to adjust the size of your image according to your needs but this is a good size to start.

First take the image you wish to create a background for, I am using this geraniums tube for an example (tube here)

Choosing a light color from the image with your color picker, flood fill the new image. like below:

This color came from the lighter area of the bowl. Now take out your pen tool and set the style to solid line and the width to 24. Choose a color in the image that you like with the picker tool. Then draw a line from top to bottom on our new image. (holding the shift key down while drawing a line will create a true straight line top to bottom).

You will notice that this line won't go all the way to edge of our picture, but that is ok. Now choose another color, I like to use a contrasting color here and draw another line fairly close to but not overlapping the first line.

Then you can choose another color from the picture or use a different shade of the colors you have already used. I chose the dark brown of the birdhouse, and this time vary the width of your lines. I set my width to about 8 for this one, and drew two lines on one side of our previous and one more line on the other side.

This is the base for our plaid. At this Point we need to Merge / Merge All. Taking the Selection tool in Rectangle shape, Select the area around the lines as close to the outside lines as possible.

Then copy and paste another close to this area. And Again on the other side. Make sure that the lines are similar in distance.

Now merge all and crop to have all the lines equal in size. Copy the image, then rotate left (or right it doesn't matter). At this point you should have three images, the original Geraniums tube, the vertical lines and the horizontal lines.

Then Paste as a new Layer on the copied image. You should have two layers one with stripes going horizontally and one with stripes going vertically. Highlight the top layer and adjust the Opacity with the slider bar to about 50%. Eureka you now have a plaid!!!

Merge all layers and add your image, a border or frame and text and you are done!