A Banner For Inside The Wendy House

My aunt over at Inside The Wendy House emailed me yesterday asking for assistance with making a banner. I asked her what sort of design she had in mind and she sent me this reply:

Hi,
I’m quite design-ally challenged and would bow down to your skills. Could we possibly incorporate the Wendy House and a picture of my face….heavens forbid 😦 My graffitti design blog is quite full on so it would have to work with that. God, I wish I had a clue!!! I’ll email my face pic. xxxx

So, the challenge was laid out – a banner that could cope with the full on background and included a picture of her face and the little Wendy House icon. Other than that, I had full creative freedom. I love creative freedom.

So, after about forty minutes of poking around (mostly colouring in leaves) I came up with this:

And here’s how I made it:

The Starting Point

Here is Wendy and lickle Fred, Fred rather covered in chocolate. I know she’s a fan of these black and white photos – very arty and glam – so I chose this one out of the couple of pictures she sent. I thought black and white would work well against the colourful background of her blog without clashing too much. Black and white also will go with anything, so this banner will hopefully be nicely transferable, should she ever change her blog design.

Unlike QWERTYmum who needs to keep her design FOREVER. (just kidding, I will, of course, be available to make new banners whenever they are desired!)

Stage 1

First I cropped the picture down to blog banner dimensions, focusing in on the faces. I used the clone stamp tool to get rid of some of the chocolate on Freddy’s face. Not all of it, we need to stay true to character after all, but the big bit across his forehead went!

Stage 2

I made a white rectangle 860 x 200 pixels in size then copy/pasted the picture on to it. After adjusting the size of the picture so it fit nicely, I used a soft edge eraser to blend the border of the photo with the white background.

Stage 3

For those unfamiliar with the Wendy House Icon, here is its base. On Wendy’s blog, the house is coloured in a little, with some flowers in front of it and ‘Inside The Wendy House’ written across the top, but I wanted to use the base design, as the flowers would get in the way of my editing plans, as would the writing. I didn’t have the font whoever made it used, so I thought it better to start from scratch!

The first step was to add back in a bit of colour, as I didn’t want the banner to be entirely black and white.

Stage 4

The first thing I did was use the Image>adjustments>colour replace tool to turn the interior red like in her icon. A history brush on the floor turned that back to brown and gave the room some dimension.

Using a regular brush, I painted the crazy paving in different colours, taking the colours from the graffitti background of the blog in hope of some colour synchronicity. I did the same for the chimney pot, then coloured in the leaves of the plant green. I only did this roughly, using the history brush again to bring the black lines back out. It’s not perfect – some white lines show where I got a bit over enthusiastic with the history brush – but I like this look. It makes it seem a little rustic, I think. I actually went round putting extra white lines in after I’d done a few by accident and liked how they looked.

Stage 5

Lastly, I painted the plant pot cream, then spent ages trying to find ‘gold’ in the colour palette for the pot decorations. Again, history brush brought the black lines back out, and the black spots in the pot.

And you so can’t tell that’s meant to be gold. It looks sort of brown. Waste of five minutes! But oh well, the intention was there. And it is a nice sort of brown.

Then I was done with the little Wendy House and it was time to bring the two images together.

Stage 6

After making all the adjustments so the house was the right size, and left enough space above it for a bit of writing, it was the same drill as before – soften the edges with a faded eraser so they blend nicely into the background.

Final Stage

I used the font Burnstown Dam for the title ‘Inside The Wendy House’. Again, downloaded this a long time ago, no clue where from. Because the background started out white, but went over Freddy’s head, I used blending options>outer glow to create the soft white glow around the letters to make them readable. I set it to white in colour, upped the spread and lowered the opacity until I was happy with it. The other font is BethHand. Again, no clue where I downloaded it, sorry!

And there it is! One, hopefully, transferrable banner that, hopefully, doesn’t clash with a busy background!

All photos are linked to their original file if you want to view any of the stages at full size.

Want something making? Leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do!