tutorial – Mixy's Art Blog

If you’re an art journaler or a mixed media artist who follows what’s new online, you almost certainly know what I mean by 21 SECRETS.

I’m thrilled to bits to announce that in the fall 2016 program, I’m joining the 21 Secrets family as a teacher!

Twice a year Dirtyfootprints Studio release a brand new 21 Secrets program, where 21 teachers from around the world offer some of their secrets – their style, techniques, methods and wisdom – in the form of an online lesson. These are bundled together in a 150+ page downloadable eBook ﬁlled with 25+ hours of videos, full colored photos & templates. And you can join the gorgeous community who gather in the 21 Secrets facebook group to share their art and ideas. There’s no time limit on the program – once you buy it it’s yours to download forever!

All this is available for the amazing value of $98

The next 21 secrets comes out 26 September 2016, and I would like to invite you to The Early Bird Sale starting 3am PST on Wednesday, August 17th and closing at 12am PST on Saturday, August 20th.

The Early Bird Sale is a discount of $10 when you use Coupon Code COLOR

This time round there’s the added bonus that there are 24 teachers!

In the interests of full disclosure this posts contains affiliate links: at no extra cost to the customer I receive a small commission on sales of the 21 Secrets Fall 2016 program made through this post. Big thanks in advance if you choose to join in here 🙂

Since I relaunched my website a little while ago, some folks have commented on the loop of images scrolling round at the top of the home page.

homescroll300hFullW

Loads of sites use scrolling images, and there are umpteen plugins and gizmos to magic up some kind of animated doodad like this. I used Electric Carousel, but there are many others out there.

Like everything, it’s easy if you know how. So I’ve put together this thing on how to prepare the pictures for a seemingly seamless picture-roundy-thing. It will assume a working knowledge of Photoshop.

So here’s how:

Starting out with one of the images you want to include, open it up in Pshop.
Now go Image>Canvas Size… [Alt+Ctrl+C]

What we’re going to do is put all the images together as a super wide picture like mine up there, then slice them up into separate images again. This’ll make sense again in a few steps time.

In order to do this we want a much wider canvas to work on. For the sake of the screenshots I’ve done 300% width, but in reality I think I did about 1000%. Eyeball it. Use your best judgment. Or actual pixel numbers, if you’re that way inclined.

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*Be sure to do these things:

Uncheck ‘Relative’. Otherwise it’ll make it taller as well as wider. We don’t want that.
Move the anchor point to Mid-Left. We want all our new canvas area on the RHS

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Using the Rectangular Marquee tool you can select the LHS half of this image and copy to a new layer Layer>New…>Layer via copy [Ctrl+J]
Drag this new layer over to the RHS.
Shuffle your original layer to the left until the raw edges meet up and just touch, so you can’t see the join. Zoom right in. You wanna get this bit pixel-perfect. There will be an annoying hiccup if it isn’t bang on.

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From here you can bring in your other images as new layers and arrange them as you wish. (I haven’t done this, pretend there are more images in the middle of this)

Now to chop it back up into separate images set vertical guides at regular distances across the width of the image. View>New Guide…

Grab the Slice tool and hit Slice From Guides.

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And finally, File>Save For Web & Devices [Shift+Alt+Ctrl+S]

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Set your settings where you want them and hit Save

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Give it a great name like scrolly_thing.jpg or RoundAndRoundAndRound.jpg or whatever…
Be sure it’s showing Format: Images Only & Slices: All Slices in the options
By the magic of Photoshop you’ll now have a set of lovely images, neatly numbered in a file called ‘images’, ready to load into the whizzy-roundy-thing of your choice.