If you’re anything like me, some of the fondest memories you may have as a child are the times spent with building blocks. Those tiny locks of plastic or wood could be a fuselage on a jet airplane one day and a castle’s gateway the next – they were limitless. They allowed you to start from the ground up in creating anything your imagination allowed.
The process explained in this tutorial follows in the footsteps of the mighty building block, as it demonstrates how Photoshop lets you build complex images one piece at a time. While photomontage techniques are common these days, the montage process we’ll outline takes a different course. Instead of blending images to form a more abstract piece, we’ll start out with a tight idea first and then loosen things up as we go.
To achieve the look of our robotic angel, it will be necessary to handle and organise a large volume of layers, which may turn some people away. If you’re looking for a more time-sensitive demonstration, we encourage you to simplify the line drawing or skip the rendering of some of her bodily segments. Make no mistake, this tutorial will take quite awhile to do. But the end results and skill learned are worth it.
