I love taking my Gelli Arts prints and manipulating them In Photoshop.  In this lesson I am going to walk you through a very simple Photoshop composite. I will take  a print that I made with a stencil, and then a print that I made with basically the inverse, and merge them together in Photoshop. The two prints came out pretty well, with colors and saturations, and a full print that I liked, so there was not a lot of photo manipulation that I needed to do. I am working on another image that required a lot more work, and I will post that at some point when I get the writeup finished.
Here was the original image of the Gelli Arts print using my Mask stencil.
I took the stencil with all the paint from printing on the Gelli Arts plate and printed on another piece of paper- so it was basically the inverse of the background print. It came out pretty well defined, but I wanted a bit more. So I waited until the stencil dried, and then scanned that in, so I could use it within Photoshop. Here is that image…
Within Photoshop, I used the select tool to delete the white background around the image of the scanned stencil. I brought that image into the same Photoshop image window as a layer above the background image. Then I used the Free Transform tool to turn and re-size the mask until it fit over the mask in the background.
At the bottom of the layers palette, there is a pulldown (Fx) that allows you to apply speciall effects to the layer. I used Bevel and Emboss on the layer with the scanned mask. So it makes the mask pop a bit. And here is the result of that composite…
And that was it! Not too hard! If you have any questions on the Photoshop tools I used, you can read through my other Photoshop posts (use the search tool to find them). There are other posts that go into further details.
Then I decided to play around with coloring. I used an Adjustment Layer called Gradient Map, and chose one of the Gradients that had blue tones in it. I used a blend mode of color, and lowered the opacity. I liked the way this looked as well…
Finally, I chose one of the Black and White Gradient masks (and I chose reverse the gradient for this one), and I liked the way this looked as well…
I could go on and on, but you get the idea ;-). Enjoy!
