A few people asked me how I made a couple of wallpapers that had AtS/BtVS promos in them. They are not up right now. It's basically easy. This is on a smaller scale and not as fancy. All you really need is the basic concepts and the rest you can add and embellish yourself.

The first thing you want to do is collect your pictures- as you can see I've got Buffy, Willow Xander and they are not in any particular order at the moment. Play with the scale so that they are all the same size evenly- otherwise they will look like they were in the fun house.

Zoom in on your image as you need to work up-close. On the tool bar, you need to select the lasso rope tool. It's important that you work against a white background layer because if you don't, you can't really see how much you're taken away.

Before you start, make sure the feather is on 1 and make sure the anti-aliased box is marked. Once you've done that, take your lasso rope and trace the area you want to remove. Create a shape and let the two ends meet [dotted lines].

Now you can delete to remove the image. Repeat this process until the entire background surrounding Buffy is removed. At this point you should be able to get the concept and work on Willow and Xander.

The next step I will take is to mask away the bottom of Buffy's shirt. Click on the icon with the gray square/white circle in it on the bottom of the layer panel [red arrow]. This is a short-cut to the masking tool. Next, on the Buffy layer, click on the white box [green arrow] and the icon with the gray square/white circle will appear next to your layer [blue arrow]. This is very important. If the icon doesn't show up, you will be painting on your image not masking it away. Next you want to go to the tool bar and select the paint brush [orange arrow].

Next you want to pick your brush size on the menu bar [red arrow]. I usually pick with 100 [orange arrow]. Then you want to select your flow preference [blue arrow]. I like to work with 18. Go to the Buffy layer on the layers panel and mask away. Make sure no lines are showing (Buffy's shirt). Once you've done that work on the other images of Willow and Xander (don't forget to make sure there are no lines). Now the order of my images are important. I have Willow behind Buffy and Xander behind Willow as if they are posed together. I also made Willow a little smaller then Buffy. Xander smaller than Willow but that's up to you.

Next, I fill the white background layer with black using the paint bucket tool [purple arrow]. This is important because the black background allows you to see if you need to remove more of the background that surrounded the Scoobies. I find the black background layer looks really nice.

I like to flatten my images- that's what I did here but again- it's your choice. Now the fun part begins. Click on the circle that has two halves- gray/white. A little window will pop up- you want Gradient Map.

This window will pop up. Click on the colors you want. I have chosen this.

There are many gradient selections you can choose from.

Put your gradient layer on soft light [blue arrow] and the fill on 44 [red arrow]. Play with the opacity and fill features to get the look you want. Remember you can use as many as you want. Sometimes I use one gradient map and other times I use ten.

Because this tutorial is on a smaller scale, I only used two gradients. On my wallpapers, I've used more than that. I felt the gradients on this piece was effecting the bottom of the Scoobies, so I masked it away just a tad.

Next, I created a new layer and placed it before the Scooby layer.

Here, I went to Filter > Render > Clouds.

I put the cloudy layer on Hard Light. The clouds really stand out under this layer effect- esp. under the gradients. Then I masked away the areas that I didn't want shown- usually that's over their faces. Once you've done all that you can add a layer of city lights or whatever stock image you'd like behind the Scoobies like I've done with the wallpapers.

Now, it's time to add the font. I put it on hard light. You can add drop shadow or glow- whatever your heart desires.

There you have it, the steps on how I create promotional art (even the VS banners I've made lately). VERY simple!