WHAT WE’RE CREATING:

We’ve been getting incredible feedback on our current vintage bundle, offering you a whopping 6GB of vintage goodies and resources for just $29 (93% Off).

Today, we wanted to give you a chance to try out some of the awesome designs for free, and give you some creative ideas for how to use them. You’ll learn how to create a beautiful vintage collage design, using various freebies, including the authentic French Papers + Manuscripts courtesy of Denise at 2 Lil Owls.

This tutorial is courtesy of community member Jo Fallon. Jo’s work is amazing, and you should definitely check it out over at RockPortraits.com.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Follow along with this tutorial: Download the freebies pack containing 5 French Manuscript papers, courtesy of 2 Lil Owls. These authentic papers were secured at auction by Denise Love from 2 Lil Owls, who then lovingly scanned them in at super hi-res, for you guys to use in your digital designs.


Step 1:

Open up Photoshop and create a new document (1200px x 1600px, 300dpi)

Open the previously downloaded freebie folder and select the ‘2LO Heritage 6’ background, paste it into your canvas and resize to fit the page. Reduce the opacity to 80%

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 2:

We’re going to build up the background using the gorgeous Scanned French Papers which are part of the hugely popular current Vintage Bundle.

Select the ‘2lil owls French Papers Script 2-13’ and paste this into your canvas. Using the transform tool, rotate it clockwise so it’s in a portrait format. Then hold down the ‘shift’ key to keep the proportions whilst you resize it to fit your canvas:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Set the blending mode to Colour Burn and reduce the opacity to 80%.

We’ll then adjust the hue/saturation to give the layer a more faded, vintage feel:

Hue/Saturation Settings:

Colorize: Selected
Hue: 8
Saturation: 10
Lightness: +20

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Here’s the result:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 3:

Select the ‘2lil owls French Papers 2-1’ and paste it into your canvas.

Rotate this 90 degrees anti-clockwise and scale to fit your canvas. Place it at the bottom of your canvas:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

We’re now going to isolate the image and text from the paper background using the Background Eraser tool. If you’re using a pen and tablet, turn the pressure sensitivity off for this step.

Background Eraser Settings:

Size: 1600px
Hardness: 100%
Spacing: 25%
Angle: 0
Roundness: 100
Limits: Discontiguous
Tolerance: 40%

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Select a plain area of the background, click and you should end up with something like this:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

It doesn’t look great at the moment, so we’ll set the layer blend mode to Multiply to fix that:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Ahh, that’s better!

Step 4:

Now let’s add a few decorative touches.

Set up some rulers and guides to help with the placement. (View > Rulers, View > Show > Guides)

Open the previously downloaded freebie folder and select the ‘Floral 4 Vector Pack’ by FanExtra.

Open the eps file and copy and paste design 2 into your main canvas.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Scale to 30% then flip the layer vertically. Duplicate the layer, flip horizontally to create a mirror image and align to the top corners like so:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Now copy and paste design 1 into your Photoshop canvas.

Scale to 30% and using your guides, place it towards the bottom left of your canvas. Duplicate the layer, flip horizontal and move it to the remaining corner:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Once you’re happy with the placement, hide the guides and merge the 4 decorative layers. Call this layer ‘Corners’ .

Set the blending mode to Multiply and adjust the hue/saturation as follows:

Hue/Saturation Settings:

Colorize: Selected
Hue: 5
Saturation: 20
Lightness: +55

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Finally for this step, copy and paste design 7 into your Photoshop canvas. Transform, rotate and place it towards the top left so it goes over the edge of your canvas:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Set the layer blend mode to Overlay and opacity to 45%

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 5:

Now we’re going to create a subtle frame for our main illustration.

With the foreground colour set to #ffffff draw a large ellipse and reduce the layer opacity to 30%

Vintage Collage Tutorial

From the 2 Lil Owls Free Textures you downloaded earlier, paste ‘2LO Confetti 9’ onto your canvas and resize so it fills the page.

Adjust the hue/saturation to the following:

Hue/Saturation Settings:

Colorize: Selected
Hue: 0
Saturation: 0
Lightness: +70

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Making sure the texture layer is above the ellipse, right-click on the texture layer and select ‘create clipping mask’. You should now have a subtle frame ready for the next step:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 6

To continue the vintage French vibe, download this awesome Marie Antoinette-ish illustration from Graphics Fairy:

Marie Antoinette-ish illustration

Paste it into your canvas and set the blend mode to Multiply and opacity to 90%. Adjust the hue/saturation to the following:

Hue/Saturation Settings:

Colorize: Selected
Hue: 40
Saturation: 20
Lightness: 0

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Scale so it nicely fills the frame. Create a layer mask and use a soft-edged brush to hide any areas that go out of the frame.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Create a new folder called ‘Marie’ and place this as the top layer.

We’re now ready to add some colour!

Step 7:

In your ‘Marie’ folder, create a new layer called ‘skin’ below the main illustration layer and set the blend mode to Multiply.

Select a round, hard-edged brush at about 17px to start.

If you have a graphics pen and tablet, set the opacity to 90% and turn on pressure sensitivity.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

If you use a mouse to colour, lower the opacity to about 10% and gradually build up the colour.

The opacity is reduced so we can still see some of the textures coming through the illustration.

You can use any skin-tone preferences, but in this example the colours used are:

Skin: #f5e8e1
Light blue eyeshadow: #ccedf1
Blush/lips: #f8ab9c

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Create a new layer set to blend mode Multiply for each of the following:

Hair
Flowers
Leaves
Feathers
Dress

Then colour each section building up the opacity to create some depth. Feel free to get creative and use a variety of shades to add depth and tone, but stick to fairly muted colours for a more authentic vintage look.

As a guide, here are the base colours used in this example:

Hair: #f5efd0
Flowers: #bc6f6f
Leaves: #66783c
Feathers & Dress Blue: #d8e2e3
Dress Pink: #889fa1

Once you’ve coloured your layers, change the folder blending mode to Multiply (instead of Pass Through). You should have something similar to this:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 8:

Create a new layer called ‘Base’ below your ‘Marie’ folder. Using the same brush settings as before, select the colour #f7f5ef.

This layer is to let you brighten up the illustration and control how much of the texture shows through.

Building up the opacity so it’s stronger in the face and central parts of the illustration, gradually fading it out towards the edges.

Here’s how it looks without the illustration:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

And with:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 9:

Now we’ll add the stamp effect by isolating another great design from the French Papers set.

Select the ‘2lil owls French Papers 2-17’ and paste it into your canvas.

Set the hue/saturation to the following settings:

Hue/Saturation Settings:

Colorize: Selected
Hue: 10
Saturation: 30
Lightness: 0

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Select the background eraser tool and increase the brush size so it covers the whole image. Using the same settings from earlier, select a plain part of the background to remove it.

Set the layer blend mode to multiply and opacity to 75%. Transform and scale so it looks similar to the image below:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Create a layer mask and use a soft-edged brush remove any hard edges:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Open the previously downloaded freebie folder and select the Grunge Frame Vectors by FanExtra.

Open the ai file in Illustrator and copy and paste the following frame into your Photoshop document:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Transform so it’s slightly larger than your canvas. We want to keep the thicker edges hidden for a more subtle effect.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

We’ll change the colour to white by bringing the lightness up to +100 in the hue/saturation settings:

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Reduce the layer opacity to 80%. Using the eraser tool at 20% opacity, gradually remove some of the frame to create a softer look.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Step 11:

Finally, download this great paper texture by bashcorpo from deviantart:

Paper Texture

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Paste it into your canvas and resize it to fit the page. Change the layer blend mode to Multiply.

And we’re done! We hope you really enjoyed this tutorial, as well as this week’s freebies.

Vintage Collage Tutorial

Don’t forget to check out this week’s deal, before it expires forever:

The Most Comprehensive Vintage Design Bundle of All Time Just $29 (Saving 93%)