In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create a poster design for a book on Scandinavian Art in Photoshop. To do this we will be using a handful of elements from The Expansive Textures and Patterns Collection featuring the North Dream Collection from Julia Dreams along with some beautiful textures from NassyArt, Offset, and Zeppelin Graphics. Once we have our poster laid out we will then apply it to a realistic poster mockup from the Design Cuts Marketplace to take it one step further. If you are all ready to begin then fire up Photoshop and let’s begin!

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Here’s a look at what we’ll be creating:

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Follow along with this tutorial: Download the freebie files

This freebie pack is just a small sample of what you can expect to find in The Expansive Textures and Patterns Collection for just $29 (that’s 99% off). With this new design bundle you can add loads of depth to your design projects with this professional and easy to use collection of textures and patterns. Whatever texture or pattern you may be looking for, we have you covered!

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Step 1: Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Let’s start by setting up a new document in Photoshop. First, give your document a name – here I am using ‘scandinavian-art-poster-design’. After that, make the document ‘8.267 inches’ wide by ‘11.693 inches’ tall with a ‘Resolution’ of ‘300’ and ‘Color Mode’ set to ‘RGB’. Once you’ve applied those settings go ahead and click ‘Create’ from the lower right corner.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

After creating your new document, go to the File menu and choose ‘Place Embedded…’ as shown here:

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Navigate to the ‘Offset’ folder located inside of the freebies folder for this tutorial and select the ‘HT15.tif’ file and choose ‘Place’ from the lower right corner as shown below:

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

After importing the texture layer, drag outwards from any of the four corners of the bounding box while holding Alt/Option on the keyboard to scale the texture up so that it stretches outside of the canvas area. Just as a quick note here – I recently upgraded to Photoshop CC 2019 where you now just need to hold Alt/Option while dragging outwards as you no longer need to hold the Shift key while scaling objects to constrain their proportion like in previous versions of the program.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Now that we’ve scaled and placed our first texture, press the ‘Return’ key to apply the changes if you haven’t already. Next, go to the Image menu and choose ‘Adjustments>Invert’ to invert the texture.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

You should now see the ‘Invert’ under the ‘Smart Filters’ that are attached to the Smart Object texture layer.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Step 2: Solid Color Adjustment

With your Smart Object texture layer selected, click on the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette and choose ‘Solid Color…’ from the menu.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Enter the hex value ‘#333333’ as shown below and then click ‘OK’ or press ‘Return’ on the keyboard.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

After applying the Solid Color Adjustment Layer, change the Blend Mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Multiply’.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Step 3: Gradient Map

With the ‘Color Fill’ Adjustment Layer selected, return to the Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette and now choose ‘Gradient Map…’ from the menu to add it to the top of the layer stack.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Next, in the Properties box, click on the gradient strip to open the Gradient Editor and then double click on the colored square in the lower left before changing the first value to ‘#0F3450’. Once you have entered this value, press ‘Return’ on the keyboard to take a step back to the Gradient Editor.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Click on the square at the bottom right of the Gradient Editor and for this we will enter the hex value ‘#00DEFF’ and then click ‘OK’ to return to the Gradient Editor once again. Now that we have entered both colors for our Gradient Map we can click ‘OK’ once again or press ‘Return’ on the keyboard to close out of the dialog boxes. Once you have returned to your main document, leave the Blend Mode of the ‘Gradient Map 1’ layer set to ‘Normal’.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

Step 4: Vintage Metal

Go to the File menu and choose ‘Place Embedded…’ as shown below:

Scandinavian Art Poster Design

For this step, we’ll grab the ‘2.jpg’ which is one of many great vintage metal textures by ‘Zeppelin Graphics’ from The Expansive Textures And Patterns Collection. If you don’t have access to this texture, you can use any similar textures that you have available in your own collection of design resources.

Scandinavian Art Poster Design