Hi everyone! Very very long time, and absolutely no see. Hehe ^^;

I admit this to be my fault-- I couldn't get on AFF for long, and the times I could, I usually forgot or got lazy. So please, forgive this tutor!

To make up for such things, here is a poster tutorial. But before we get there, some stuff to give to you:

1. There is a huge ad space now on Pixlr. Is anyone else super annoyed by this?? I was so surprised when I got on and boom! Like 1/4th of the whole page: gone!

2. I don't know if you know about this, but here is a super great thing that I found during my very long unofficial hiatus time. Renders!! They're basically pngs who've done the cutting for you! Search up, for instance, "shinee render" and get a bunch of awesome results. Of course, sometimes (lots of times) you may end up having to use another picture simply because the render photos you've found just doesn't match with the poster genre. [DON'T TRY TO FORCE HAPPY PHOTOS INTO SAD POSTERS, ETC. It just may ruin the whole thing! (random tip)]

3. The sources of the following photos (textures, stock, etc.) are: moonangel517's photobucket pictures (THANK YOU! I am greatly in your debt) and dearyYamachii, Know-chan, and thisisdahlia on deviantart (awesome render photos there: search this person up). May my heartful gratefulness reach all of you.

4. Also, you may notice in the screenshots that I am using Chrome for Pixlr. For some reason, when I try to use the font tool on Internet (which I usually use), it makes text layers but not the text box. I was countlessly unable to do stuff because of this horrifying problem, so I switched to Chrome for all my Pixlr doings. I am a firm Internet Explorer user, so I am kind of disgruntled about this issue, but I digress. On with the show.

That's it for now, so let's get on with this.

The textures I used are:

 <--(used this one for the background)  

And the stocks were:

      ... or at least, variations of them.

When you are looking for the stocks and the textures, you pretty much have to know what kind of toned poster you want. Ask yourself: Cool and dull colors, or bright and cheerful ones? Light and soft, or bold and exaggerated? What is the genre? What is the story? What is the general feeling you want the person who's looking to feel?

For stock especially, remember certain things that play big parts in the story. Even if it's for a contest, make up a story behind the prompt. Create a summary for yourself, just so you can avoid being vague and too general on things. Also, I recommend reading a chapter or at least the foreword for requests you get. Going only by the request may be too off point.

EXAMPLE: If for a poster request the author puts "dark, angst, romance" in one request, you should know whether to play up the 'dark' or the 'angst' or the 'romance'. The summary helps; if it doesn't, you should really try going into the story at least once.

Going on...

As you could probably tell from my ID, I am a IU and B2ST fan. So I set out to make a soft romance IUseob poster. But it can be boring if there are only two characters, I added one more. Though I love Jiyoon, there were no suitable renders and I was too lazy to search more, so I chose a popular and easy person to choose: Suzy.

So here's the love triangle poster: IU, Yoseob, and Suzy. Ready? :)

0. Choosing the characters.

So you've already gotten your textures, you know what you want, and what kind of poster you're looking for. Great! Now for choosing the character pictures.

It would be breaking pretty much all rules of poster-making if you choose a smiling and bright photo for a horror poster, unless it has a horror-like tone to it. AS IN: the smile isn't reaching her eyes, and she looks forced or she's crying while smiling. That may work, but it's harder to get it to set the poster right.

Here are the main three "rules", you might say, to such choosing:

     1. Stay away from selcas and cut-off photos. At the very least, the head should be whole.

     2. Don't take already toned/edited photos. Black and white? Radiant and neon? No thank you.

     3. Make sure the emotions are right. As I've said, character pictures usually should stay in the emotion needed. Stocks you can make it the tone you want: charactes are the main points of the poster. It will be much, much harder to convince someone of a horror poster with smiling people than scared, frightened ones.

There are exceptions present, but hopefully you'll know it when you get there.

1. Character Photo "Tuning" (may not be needed at times.)

  to

First, I opened up all those files. In IU's case, there are letterings that disrupt the photo. Here is when I "tune" the photo so that it's alright to use for making it into a poster.

 Use the brush and the dropper tool (helpful tip: When you press 'ctrl' while in brush, the tool momentarily changes to dropper. The moment you stop pressing 'ctrl' it goes back to brush. Saves lots of time.) to make it at the very least unnoticeable. If you look closely, you can see the places I've brushed up kind of obviously. It doesn't have to be perfect: nobody's going to nano-analyze your posters. Probably.

I also flipped hers because all three of the people pictures face the same way. It can be awkward if that's the case, so go to IMAGE>Flip canvas horizontal. I did the same with Suzy's just so we can have more diversity in facial positions.

Also, I took this time to make my background a smaller size. As you can see below, circled in red is the size it used to be. That size, 1024x768, is way too big to be a nice poster in somebody's story.

For me, the magic number for posters is 800x600 or 600x800 (if vertical). A lot of texture/stocks/other materials are usually set in that ratio, so if you keep the picture in proportion and then use the slider from IMAGE>Image Size, the box below will pop up and all you have to do is slide it down to 800 or 600.

2. Combining and Resizing

 --> 

I put the three characters on my designated background (the one in the textures). I actually tend to use textures for backgrounds, mostly because it's more unnoticeable that way for me. However, it can be anything-- sometimes a stock, a texture, even just a blank white canvas.

Then I resized pretty much all the characters. I left suzy almost the same because her size is originally the smallest as well. Also, the hard edge that IU had, I softened with a 200-sized soft eraser brush, so that it's not as harsh.

As for the positioning, it's better to have variety of levels than none at all, especially when you have more than 2 characters. Suzy was chosen to go down that way because she had hard edges in that corner-- it would be less obvious if she was put into such a corner. Yoseob was the only full-bodied one, so he was put in the middle to hide the hard edges of the other characters.

For IU, anywhere she went she'd have to be softened somehow, so there she went, as a free-for-all that could go anywhere and have the same result.

Also, in resizing the faces should be proportional to each other somehow. Of course there are many posters where the face sizes are vastly different on purpose, but for posters with many main characters, they should be pretty similar. But this is something that's only a recommendation, not a must.

3. Stocks I (the winter picture)

As you can see, the winter stree stock photo has been inserted in. Since I really didn't want to hide the character's faces (remember, they are the main in most posters), I put the poster to the back because it would serve only as an enhancer, not a main photo.

Here is when things get fun: you get to experiment! Remember back in chapter 10 we told you about blending? You use them for stocks a lot of times.

For this winter photo I used the option of hardlight. Full opacity, because I didn't need to show anything particularly below that.

Then because I didn't want the hard edges to be obvious, I used my 200-sized soft brush eraser again to soften up the edges so it looks more natural.

4. Stocks II (the lights)

Textures are for toning, but stocks can also be used to enhance the lighting and the feeling of the poster, as I've done with this photo. Above is the picture just inserted, its white borders that had been present cut off from the picture itself in the beginning.

Here I will show you how to FREE TRANSFORM and a useful trick for making stocks/textures all the more compatible.

After inserting into the main poster, I flipped the image only with free transform.

IN FREE TRANSFORM, you can rotate, resize, and flip a layer as much as you want. You can reach there by going to EDIT>Free Transform. Simple!

To flip, drag on edge to beyond the other side. It may sound a bit confusing, but it's actually pretty easy.

Anyways, I did just that and then used the blending thing again but screen this time, full opacity yet again (shown above). Since I wanted to use this for general toning, I left it the highest layer for now. Then the rotation came.

To rotate in free transform, when you move your mouse outside of the corners, a small bending arrow appears. You click and drag in a circle, deciding what angle you want. Again, it's very simple. :)

This will be a bit confusing, so follow with the pictures:

First, as you can see, I rotated it into a random angle (45?).

Then just like the red arrow drawn, I streched it out that way.

Then I streched it out vertically (in a way), so that the stock picture is now huge.

Notice how the cluster of white lights cover up the empty spot beneath IU. It is in your best interest to cover up such spots with something so that it isn't obvious or even evident. Like that, you wouldn't really notice that IU's arm and body is pretty much nonexistant, right? That is exactly the point here.

But now there's a new problem:

The black lines and the lighting is marring Yoseob's face. Not only that, but even Suzy's face is a bit weirded out because of the lines.

Well, fear not, my friends, for here is the awesome trick in getting across this problem, and it's super simple too!

As easy as coloring: You take the brush tool, the dropper tool (remember the "ctrl" shortcut), and color in the spots you want gone. First, let's get rid of the lines going through Yoseob.

At this time, change it back to the normal state and not in the blending setting so that you can clearly see the colors. It might help to lower the opacity so you know where to color in and get gone.

Using the dropper tool, you make it look natural and all. The end result of erasing only the lights line:

...it's obviously colored in, but nobody's going to notice. Why? It's not in its full opacity, that's why. Put it in the blending setting (screen) again, and voila!

It's still not finished though, as you can see, but the black lines are gone as if it had never existed in the very first place. Mission success, I'd say.

The circled in parts are the ones you want to change again, and when you do the coloring trick again, you can come up to this:

...in which the faces are in its original but now orange-er selves. And thus, the step is finally over.

5. Textures I (Orange Thing)

(NO PICTURES BECAUSE I FORGOT TO SCREENSHOT HERE HEHE SORRY)

But basically, I made the picture cover the whole poster and put it on multiply opacity 11.

6. Textuers II (Clock)

Here I've already put it to the setting of overlay, full opacity. It looks pretty good here, but you'll notice that the clock is protruding Suzy's face, which is not very good because faces are the everything.

So I adjusted the image by moving the clock to the corner, thus making a difference in tone as such:

And here is where I use my handy dandy 200-sized soft brush eraser yet again. The end result has been skipped because of one very forgetful tutor person. Sorry.

Despite this, it looks natural in the finale picture, so yay! Proved right there.

7. Touching Up

Now this stage is sometimes unneeded, but most times for me I kind of need it. There are a few unmistakably awkward places in the poster as of this stage, and here I fix these up so they're not too awkward or stands out.

For example, right here:

It's too... untoned here, you might say. It feels to me as if it's not very much a part of the poster but a simply random corner. Not good, not good.

To make up for it, I decided it to make it more orange. Cue the duplicate!

(In other words, I duplicated the orange texture layer that had no pictures and at first it looked like this:

And then my super useful 200-sized soft brush eraser came back into play and erased everywhere but that one corner and became liked this:

and you can see the difference here:

  from the before

in that one corner.)

But alas, one duplicate did not satisfy me, so I duplicated the duplicated layer again to make the following:

 Compare to  from before.

Then because the empty spaces between Yoseob and Suzy was awkward again, so I deleted the duplicated layer's duplicate and I re-duplicated the original orange texture and erased everywhere with the eraser except the spaces to replace the deleted layer and made it into:

Not sure if it shows well, but there you go. That is exactly what I did.

Also, by now you probably have many layers. This is perfectly normal: and especially when you add in the text, the layers are numerous.

Before I added the text, I already had this much layers for such a simple poster:

So have no worries, and just work with your bliss. Fun is why I do this, so have fun while you do it too! :)

8. Text

Here I cannot help you as much, since I took no in-between screenshots. It's all in the experimenting and fonting, but I can give a few quick tips.

1. Don't use too much fonts. Try to stick to a few (at the most, 4) fonts, or else it might become super confusing and weird.

2. Don't make your font colors too popping. It should be one with the surrounding, one with the tone, and definitely one with the poster. It should feel as if the words are part of the poster, not something quickly pasted into a poster by somebody else. But on the other side, don't use the same color for everything. Use colors that are similar, that compliment each other, and that doesn't clash with its background.

3. Your font should match the tone. No wacky ones for serious posters, or scary ones for romcom posters.

4. Use the Layer Styles. Reach there by using this: . It has stuff that will enhance your fonts by a lot. In fact, you can also use the layer styles for regular photos as well, if you want.

My final poster was this:

(it is in its full size)

I am no master poster maker/graphic designer whatever. This is a really simple poster, but even so I take some time (about an hour and a half not counting the searching for pictures). I hope these eight steps that I generally follow will help you to have ideas and develop a good style and order of your own, and the random tips here enhanced your Pixlr knowledge.

If you have any more questions, they are sincerely welcomed and we'll help you out with whatever dilemma you have. I'm once again sorry that we took so long to update the tutorial; hopefully this year that will change. Simply comment, and we'll be your tutors! :)

Happy designing, everyone! And a pretty late Happy New Year!