This is my first tutorial at the request of my brother, so here you go Jon – I am going to show you how to make this picture using a Photoshop mask and a custom brush in Illustrator.
We begin by making our mask shape in Illustrator. I brought my original picture into Illustrator so I could use it as a reference when making the mask. Lock the image in the layers pallet to prevent you from accidentally selecting it during the next few steps.
Next we will make our mask by drawing shapes over the image in black ink. For this example, I used a custom brush from BitBox.com and the paintbrush tool and just drew random lines over the image while experimenting with different lines shapes, lengths and brush sizes.
Once you have got a bunch of lines that cover most of your image, hit control-A to select them all and then select Object->Expand Appearance. This will convert the brushed lines into paths.
Group that whole mess together and then copy it to the clipboard. Create a new document in Photoshop and paste the mask into it. When asked how to paste the image, choose “Pixels”.
Now open up your original image in Photoshop and copy and paste it into the document containing your mask. Move the mask layer to the top and then resize it as desired.
Move your mask layer to the bottom again and then right click the image layer and select “Creating clipping mask”.
Give the w
hole thing a background and voila! Play with different brushes and shapes and see what kind of crazy stuff you come up with. Here’s the same image using the technique demonstrated here.
ash…