Masks are cool. Once you figure out “Control-G” on PSE (and the clipping function on PS), it’s The World is Your Oyster! Photos, papers, all kinds of digital stuff can be clipped to them. You can use them as an element unto themselves as backgrounds to images.
In this case, I figured I’d draw and scribble a mask of my own on paper, and then digitize it.
This is the shape I scribbled:
A simple triangle shaded in with a pencil. It’s not incredibly elegant, but it does have some terrific texture! You can go ahead and grab this if you want and do your own thing with it. :-)
The trick is to increase the contrast between your scribble and the paper so that when you magic wand and delete the white paper background (with a transparent layer under it) the edges will come out pretty clean. Or as clean as you want it. And save as a .PNG file to keep that new transparency.
Here’s an example of a layout using my own pencil-drawn mask:
With this mask, I noticed that the pencil texture showed up when I changed the blending mode of the photograph. The blending modes were different for Baxter the white dog and Radar the black dog. It’s fun to experiment a little sometimes. :-D
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