Watercolor Collage

Decide on a topic: person/place/movie/etc. You will need to add 6-7 photos. Make sure the photos are good quality and roughly resize them so they fit on the canvas.

Getting Started

Set the document size to 1920 x 1080.

Add an adjustment layer … Pattern. Choose one of the paper ones.

First Photo

Make sure your colors are set to the default (‘D‘).

  1. Paste in a photo and rename the layer appropriately.
  1. Add layer mask.
  1. Brush tool – select a brush from the Watercolor Collage folder in Brushes.
  1. Click on the photo once, trying to not have the brush go beyond the edges (don’t want any straight edges).
  1. CTRL+I to invert.

If you don’t like how it looks, you can try again – fill the mask with white (CTRL+Backspace), then click on the area again with the brush and invert it.

  1. Hide the photo layer for now.

More Photos

Repeat for 5-6 more photos.

  1. Paste in a photo and rename it.
  2. Add a layer mask.
  1. Choose a watercolor brush and click inside the photo.
  2. CTRL+I to invert.
  3. Hide the layer for now.

Repeat these steps for each photo until you have something like this…

Straight edges?

If you see the straight edges from the photo, then you need to switch your color to black and paint on the layer mask with with one of the edges brushes on the edges of the photo to get a softer/nicer edge.

Reset the Brush tool to the default…

Position Photos

Show each photo layer again. Then CTRL+T to move each picture so they are filling the canvas (not off the edge) and overlapping.

Stop and get your masking/brushes checked off before continuing…

Text

Select the Text tool. Also select any thick font type and make it a decent size to start.

Click on the canvas and type 1-2 words. Click off to set the text.

Then CTRL+T to resize it, making sure it’s stretching the width of the photos but not too tall.

Warp

CTRL+T and right-click > Warp.

Then go to the Options Bar and choose Bulge from the drop-down list. Adjust the tops to cover text and click on Done.

Stroke

Go to layer styles and add Stroke -reset to default, then set to Outside, size 5 px and white.

No Fill

Reduce the layer Fill to 0%.

You should now have this…

  • If you have 2 words, you may want to change the Warp type to Lower Arc.
  • You may also want to have some Fill.