Here’s my tutorial for my attempt at a truthful movie poster.

1. Even though I’m beyond raw with Photoshop, I still stuck with it for this work. Call me stubborn.

2. The polygonal lasso (PL) was definitely my go-to tool–it allows me to easily outline around a number or letter and thus isolate a particular space.

3. I started with the PL and outlined the 6 in “60.” My first goal was to rotate the 6 to create a 9, and there’s probably a way to do this easily. Instead, I first copy/pasted the area to create a duplicate 6, which I moved to the side. I used the Edit, Transform, Rotate tool to then turn this copy into a 9. I re-selected the area around the original 6, and used the Brush Tool to fill it in with black. Then I moved over the 9 I’d just created and positioned it just so. Pretty easy.

4. One move I had to keep making as I did this work was Layer, Flatten Image. Each time you copy and paste a section in Photoshop, you essentially create a new layer. Experts get really good at moving between layers to control/adjust elements, but I’m a total rookie and it was easier for me to just flatten the layers out each time so I was just working with one canvas. I’m sure what I just wrote would drive knowledgeable Photoshop folks crazy and reveals my total n00bness.

5. Using this select-copy-paste-flatten process, I was able to move copies of existing letters to the dark area on the left and perform operations in order to create new letters. Creating most of the new letters was pretty easy. I used the PL tool to highlight areas and then copy/paste them into new places, or fill them with color instead. Zooming in helped, and I used the Clone Stamp tool to copy some of the gritty weathered look. Once a new letter passed the “glance test” I moved on.

6. The major challenge was M. All of the letters provided were the same width, so this took some playing around. My first attempt began with an N, and I copied the rightward slanting middle stoke to serve as the last stroke in the new letter. This ended up as looking out of place, something like “N\” if you can imagine that. I decided this wouldn’t be good enough, that I basically need to build a new letter out of the raw material of an N. This took a lot of copy-paste and finessing until it looked okay.