TUTORIAL: Outlining

When I added the new layout earlier, Rai asked me to write a tutorial on how I did the outlining effect on this banner. His words: “I tried something like that and ended up a disaster XD” – so Rai, hopefully this will help! It’s really simple, so the tutorial doesn’t go into too much detail.

Outlining Tutorial

No resources this time, use whatever images you want.

Tutorial

1. I made the base of my banner, adding a couple of background textures and playing with the blend modes and saturation. Obviously, you can use whatever you like in the background.

2. Next, add your people, having erased their backgrounds. I find it easiest to do this with a size 10 eraser brush, set to a hardness of around 50. That way, you don’t end up with the edges being too blurry or too jagged. That said, you need to make sure that ALL the background is erased, and that you don’t leave behind anything that will show up on the colour outline. Best to zoom in reaaallly close.

3. Once everyone’s in position and you’re happy with their colouring etc, add a new raster layer. Click onto your selection tool, and set it to Freehand Selection. In the Selection Type drop-down menu, choose “Point to Point”.

4. Then it’s simply a case of outlining the characters, clicking every so often around them to achieve the desired effect. Once you’ve gone around them, right click and it’ll become a floating selection, which you can then flood fill with the colour of your choice. DON’T get rid of the floating selection just yet.

5. Add a new raster layer, then go to Selections >> Modify >> Expand and set it to around 4 or 5 pixels. This will make your floating selection jump outwards a little. Flood fill this with a different colour, and then drag both layers beneath the characters.

6. Finally, for this banner, I just added some embellishments – brushes in the background, the text, borders etc. And you’re done!

Hmm...I thought we already had a Tut on this XD

But it looks great on the header!

I "retired" the old one a while ago. This is a nice, new one with a better example graphic XD