Photomontage with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (The Lion With a Thorn in His Paw)

For this example of building a photomontage with Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop, I will use a page for a children's book for which I am currently designing illustrations. The story is an adaptation of the old Aesop's fable of the lion with a thorn in his paw, specifically the scene with the lion helplessly licking his paw, so I'll show you how to build that page in this tutorial. Here is the final result:

*This tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

1. I'll start in Photoshop, with a U.S. letter page in landscape layout, saved as "lionthorn.psd" to a well-named folder that I can always find. First I need the background of sky and ground/folliage. I always photograph the stages of paintings that I work on in the real world (ie, not digitally), when I see landscapes, skyscapes or other natural forms start to emmerge, and save them in a file to use for this very purpose. So, I'll open two of those that I think will be good to work with, rotate and crop to the sections I want, then copy & paste them into my .psd document and re-name their layers "sky" and "ground":

2. I'll work on the sky first, so let's turn off the visability for the ground layer. Most of this sky will need to look abstract, like clouds in a sunset, but I want to save this butterfly shape to keep in focus for later. Select the butterfly with the Pen tool, convert the path to a selection in the Paths pallet, then cut and paste it onto another layer, by selecting Layer, New, Layer Via Cut from the Menu bar. Name that layer "butterfly" and turn off its visability.

Fill in the void left by the cut by selecting the hole on the sky layer with the Magic Wand, then expand the selection by selecting Selection, Modify, Expand from the Menu bar. Enter 4 in the dialog box, and click OK. Now select Edit, Fill from the Menu bar and choose "Content Aware" from the dialog box.

Next, I want to blur the details of the sky, and blend & mix some of the colors to create an interesting, stormy sunet sky, with a weak sun (it's a bad day for the lion). Start by applying a filter to the entire layer: select Filter, Artistic, Underpainting from the Menu bar. In the filter dialog box, use a large brush and a lot of texture coverage (watch the preview and adjust to taste). That has softened up some edges, but we need more. Add a new layer and name it "mixerbrush". Make sure that it sits on top of the "sky" layer, with all other layers locked and visablity turned off. Select the Mixer Brush from the Tool bar (under the Paintbrush), use a simple, round, soft brush (the first in the Brushes pallet) and increase its size to 300. Ensure the Control panel is set to Very Wet, Heavy Mix, and the Clean After Every Stroke option is on. Start pulling and pushing the color around on the "sky" layer to blend them, going for a smooth, rolling clouds texture.

Now, to build up some cloudforms, switch to the regular Paintbrush, add a new layer named "clouds", and use a soft round brush, set to 500. I set the first layer of colors by double-clicking on the foreground color in the Tool panel, then using the eye dropper in the Color Picker dialog box to select the pinkish-orangey tones in the sky and raising the white to get a light tint of that color. Gradually build up layers of cloud, changing opacity, brush size and hue for variety.

3. Next, we'll work on the ground and foliage. Make the ground layer visible, and unlock it. First, we'll remove the hard edges and the bright blue areas to give us forms that look more like folliage, dirt and rocks. Drag down a horizontal guide from the rulers, just to keep an idea of where the horizon should be. Select the Eraser tool, set to Brush mode, with a relatively hard edge, and begin erasing the "ground" layer. Continually change brush size for variety around what might be leaf and rock edges.

I want to leave some of the blue areas, for shadow, but I need them to be more of a green hue, so as to resemble shrubbery. I'll add an Adjustment layer, Hue/Saturation, and bring the hue slider down to the greens, the saturation up a bit, and I'll darken the tone, by bringing the lightness slider down. Now, the whole image has been adjusted, and I just want the "folliage" changed, so I'll make use of the Adjustment layer mask. Click on the mask icon to select it, and select Edit, Fill from the Menu bar, choosing Black from the dropdown menu. Click OK. The Hue/Saturation adjustments I made before have all been masked out. Now, I'll paint with with white in the mask, to bring those adjustments back where I want them only. It's easiest to first select the ground structure, to isolate your painting within the ground, without the white brush bleeding out into the sky.

4. To get a more dimensional space for the lion to sit in, I'll need a floor and some extra rocks and plant forms. I get can make all of those straight from the painted folliage I already have here. First, for the floor, I will add a new layer, name it "floor" and use the Clone tool to create a structure, sampling from the "ground" layer, by making sure the "sample from all layers" option is cllicked in the Control panel. Before building, first use the rectangle Marquee tool to isolate a stage for which to hold the floor. Use the Clone tool with a medium sized, soft brush to randomly select your source (alt+click) and paint floor, clicking to select and then to paint with as much variety and randomness as possible, to get a naturalistic jungle floor. With all other layers invisable except "floor" and "sky":

This does not need to look incredibly realistic yet, as most of this floor will be covered. As a last step, to make the horizon look distant, use the rectangle Marquee tool to select a strip around the horizon line, feather the selection 50 pts, and use the Gaussian Blur filter by selecting Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. Use the preview to get a smooth blur, fading into the distance, as shown above.

5. For the extra plant and rock forms, we will sample again from the "ground" layer with the Clone tool. This time, pick several interesting paint brushes for variety, and artful-looking strokes. I used mostly the round angle and the round blunt, but go by your instincts. Remember that this is a children's illustration, not a photorealistic postcard, so have fun and be creative. It's easiest to turn off the visabilty for other layers, and just set these plant and rock form far apart and on several different layers, for selecting and modifying later.

6. Turn off the visabilty for these rocks and plants for now (they are distracting, as is), and turn on the visabilty for your other layers. I have already created my vector lion in Illustrator (a separate tutorial :).

In Photoshop, I will Choose File, Place, and navigate to where I have my Illustrator vector lion file saved. I want the lion on a top layer, so at first, he will just be sitting on top of everything. In order to make this look a little more real, view the rocks and plant layers again. Select the pieces of rocks and folliage separately by using the Lasso tool, then switch to the Move tool and simply drag the shape to where you need it, around the lion and on the floor. Keep the shape manipulatible by putting it on its own layer: while selected, hit Shift+Ctrl+J. Now you can tranform, rotate (Ctrl+T) and move the shapes to build up plants and realistic ground.

To make the foreground plants and rocks look separate from the background, select each plant or rock separately (Lasso tool works best) and make some image adjustments by selecting Image, Adjustments, and Curves OR Color Balance OR Hue/Saturation from the Menu bar. These adjustments can change the contrast, hue, or vibrance so that the foreground objects will stand out better from the background. Arrange the rocks and plants around and in front of the lion, so that he looks more like he's sitting within a jungle space.

7. Now that we have all the pieces and parts, it will take an artful eye and some common sense to make the image look like a more natural, deep space. For example, the light on the lion is coming from the opposite side of the sky, so I'll select the "sky" layer and choose Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal to change that. Adding shading where needed, like under the lion's paws and stomach, and over the background floor space, will be easy, since I've kept everything on separate layers. I used the Paintbrush, experimenting with shades of extant colors, a blending mode of either Darken or Multiply, with a low opacity to add shadows. Vary the brush size and softness/hardness to imply different surfaces of the rocks and plants in the background. For example, the overhanging ground forms behind the lion would be blurrier and less vibrant than the foreground forms. With all layers turned on, you should be able to see what looks strange and needs tweaking, so use your best judgement.

8. Remember the butterfly? It will be the perfect addition to the now rather empty cloudy area to the upper left, after the Flip Horizontal command. Turn the butterfly layer visability back on, and use Ctrl+T to rotate, shrink and move the butterfly so that it flutters just above the lion's head. Use Edit, Transform, Skew to reshape the wings.

9. This image will be set within a portrait layout page, and since this is a landscape layout, I will add a border and some flourishes above and below the image in Illustrator. Open a new Illustrator document, set for Print, U.S. letter, and change the artboard option to 2. Select File, Paste to put the lion image on artboard 1.

10. Some thorny flourishes would be perfect, so I'll Google "throny roses" to find a starting place, and paste that .jpeg onto artboard 2. I've found a tatoo tracery that I would like to change (I want more thorns and I don't want roses), so I'll turn this bitmap into a vector by selecting it and pressing the "Live Trace" button in the Control panel. The black and white default is perfect for what I need, so I don't need to change any trace options. Press the "Expand" button, and then choose Object, Ungroup from the Menu bar.

Some of the rose parts need to be separated first, and the easiest way is to use the Eraser tool to just erase right through the connection. Illustrator joins the open points automatically to close your shape back together. Nice of them, huh?

Now I can alter the shapes to my heart's content by using the Pen tool, and it's add point, subtract point and convert point sub-tools. I can pull out points to turn into thorns with the Arrow tool, and break smooth curves into corners by holding down Alt before clicking on a handle. If you haven't had much experience with the Pen tool, what are you waiting for??? It's the most powerful tool in the whole program to customize shapes!



11. After I've made a couple thorny embellishments, I can copy and paste them onto artboard 1, where I can multiply them, arrange them, rotate, and resize them, reflect them (Reflect tool) to make my flourishes. Turn on guides (View, Guides or Grid), or make your own (View, Rulers, then pull down guides from the rulers), to line everything up perfectly. Add a border around the image by drawing a black box with the rectangle Shape tool on a layer below, and another box with an empty fill and a thin black border on a layer under that.

Turn off your guides, and voila! Fin!