Ian Swenson .com

The next step is to erase. What? Are you mad? I just created this, now I have to erase it?

Whoa, ease back on the self-incredulity. I don’t mean erase it entirely; I mean artistically erase bits of it.

I suggest you grab a grungy brush pack or two. What you want are textures, like cracked earth or rusted metal or water-stained paper or just plain artistic grunge. These are your new erasers.

This part of the process is very much trial and error. Just start messing around by erasing things lightly and seeing how you like the outcome. Here are two screenshots to show before & after:

Notice that I’ve changed the Opacity of the eraser here. You can vary that to get your desired results. The other thing you can do here that I didn’t here — but did on the original — would be to copy your layers and merge those copies together. Make your master layers invisible by click the “eye” icon next to them. Then use the eraser tool on all the components at the same time.

Now let’s use guides to select the section for an image. You can use guides by having the Rulers displayed under the View menu (also CTRL + R toggles them). Then click and grab on either the horizontal or vertical ruler and drag onto the canvas. If you have the proper layer selected it will snap to its side when you get near it.

Once you have your four guides in place, select it using the box selection tool or the cropping tool (probably stay away from the latter for now). Copy the selection (CTRL + C), create a new canvas (CTRL + N or File -> New), and paste the selection here (CTRL + V). Save the file in the folder you’ve created for Wordpress as a .jpg file.

If you’re having trouble with getting the erasers to look the way you want to, make sure you look at the last screenshot for ideas.

Once you’re done with that, you’re ready to get going with your first working copy of the web site. We’ll cover that in the next tutorial.