Here’s a cool idea posted by our main moderator Marian. It was inspired by THIS WEBSITE over at Bored Panda.

Marian is constantly posting images from really cool photographers, most of them are portrait and very high quality. This on the other hand is different, fun and quirky. What a cool gift for your grandkids.

How he does it:
My 9 year old grandson draw a dinosaur for his little 5 year old brother and my daughter sent it to me. I turned it into a “real picture” for him and he was delighted. The daughter said all 3 boys were smiling over it. Yes, you can point out errors in it, but it wasn’t for perfection. Hey, I had fun doing it for them!

Jim asks:

“Marian, this would be fun to do for my grand kids. Once I have scanned the image of their artwork, where in PS do I begin to bring it to life?”

Marian replies:

Hey Jim, Not a problem!  There’s a couple of ways to do it, here’s what I did.

I Googled “dinosaur images” until I found one or two that I liked, (I was going for the skin texture mostly.)

Using layers, I dragged in the first hand drawn image as the background layer.  I then added the dinosaur image on top of that and reduced the opacity, so I could see the underlying hand drawn image.

Using the eraser tool, I erased where I could to match the hand drawn background image.  I flipped, rotated, enlarged the dinosaur image until there was “enough skin” to match the hand drawn image. 

Every once in a while, I hid the hand drawn background layer, to see the progress of my “real dinosaur.” I cloned and erased, where needed.

Once I had my dinosaur done, I searched the intenet for desert type images and simply put my dino into the image.  I then cropped and turned into a JPG file. I then opened the JPG file and tweaked where necessary. I just looked at the shadows of the plants and darkened where he is standing

Another thought is to open 2 windows. Hand drawn in one, dinosaur in the other and clone from one to another. (I’m sure that our resident Yoda Guru has a better/easier way.) 

Again, this is not “to perfection.”  It’s something for the kids and you’ll get ideas while “diddling” in Photoshop.

My greatest joy is too see my grandkids faces when my daughter showed them the final image. Have fun! Marian

Fun or what? Enjoy

The link to this thread is HERE

Yours in success in photography

Rob