Most mixed media and collage artists start by getting their hands dirty. Gesso, modelling paste, acrylics and glue come first—then, a chance encounter with image editing software allows them to add digital effects to their work. For me, it was the opposite way around.

As a website editor, I had long used editing software professionally. When my son was born, I decided to use it for fun, making digital scrapbook pages and, later, collages. After a while, I started craving the tactile quality of traditional collage—the thickness of paint, the frills of lace, the layers of photographs—and switched to the hybrid style I now use regularly.

However, I still do purely digital collages every now and again, and, most of all, I use software to create new backgrounds to use in my hybrid work.

Digital backgrounds are quick and easy to do. My starting point is a transparent canvas of either 8″x11″ (21.5cm x 27.94cm) or 12″x12″ size (30.48cm x 30.48cm) or the standard European A4 (21cm x 29.7cm) with a resolution of 300 dpi (this measures how many pixels fit in one inch of paper—300 is common standard for prints). I have Adobe Photoshop and, to open the canvas, I select File–> New, and set the file name, size and background colour preferences in the window that comes up.

Usually, I already have a colour palette in mind for the background, but sometimes is useful to see it alongside the main canvas as a visual prompt. This is easily done by creating a new file (File–>New)—I like a custom size of 300×300 pixels and a transparent background. Then, using the rectangular marquee tool, I select an area (smaller than the canvas). Using the Set foreground colour tool I choose the colours I want for my background, then using the paint bucket tool, I fill the palette canvas with the first of my chosen hues. Then, I switch back to the marquee and select another area, which I fill with a second, complementary colour using the paint bucket tool. And so on and so forth, until I have picked all the colours I am planning to use.

Now, I fill the main canvas with one of my chosen colours, using the paint bucket. This will be my base. Then I start building the other colours, much like you’d do with acrylic paints—the one advantage being that you don’t have to let the layers dry! I give each colour its own layer because it makes it easier to rectify or delete mistakes. To do so, I choose Layer–>New–>Layer. I almost never give the new layer a name because I am lazy but this is WRONG. Very wrong. Naming a layer makes it easier to locate when you are twenty layers into your background.

Then I select a brush with the brush tool and start applying the ‘paint.’ Which brush, and which size I use crucially depend on the mood of the moment and the effect I hope to achieve—much as you’d do with real acrylics. I will often switch brush size and type for different colours.

If you have made it so far, you may be despairing because all you have is some large, ugly blobs of colour on your canvas—but fear not. It is time to play with the layers’ opacity.

Opacity controls how much of each layer will show on your canvas. By altering it, and altering the blending mode used to mix layers together, you can achieve very different effects. To play with the layers, go to Window–>Layers. A window will appear showing each layer. Select one layer from the window. At the top of the window, there is the word  Opacity with, next to it, a percentage. The default value is 100% which means that all the layer you are working on is shown, and the one beneath is covered. By adjusting it, you can have increasing amounts of the lower layer showing through.

To the left of the word Opacity, there is a drop-down menu showing the word: Normal. That’s the blending mode dropdown. Each of the blending modes in that drop down allow you to create a different look—Darken will look at the base colour, at the colour you are trying to blend it with and chose the darker of the two; Lighten will do the opposite; Multiply multiplies the base colour by the blending colour to obtain a darker hue.

Play with these two until the colours don’t look like blobs but somehow hang together. Better, right?

That said, your canvas is still looking very flat. It is time to give it a bit of texture.  Choose Layer–>New–>Layer and name it Texture. You can then paste a nice texture on your newly created layer. But wait! Where do you get texture from?

There are plenty of sites out there that provide digital pictures of interesting textures for free—Stock Xchng (run a search for texture) and Mayang are two of the many. Read the terms and conditions carefully, as not all textures can be used in artwork you are going to resell. Beware, though—texture is addictive. Before long, you will run around town snapping pictures of dirty walls, peeling paint and rusting metals—all of which make fabulous textures for digital backgrounds. And of course you can use scanned images of your own paintings.

Sometimes the texture image may be smaller than your canvas—don’t worry. Just resize it to cover the whole background by going to Edit–>Transform–>Scale and dragging the arrows to the edges of the canvas. Now the texture completely obscures the colours below, and of course you don’t want that. What to do? Use the layers’ opacity and blending modes of course. Pick those that best suit your purpose—I find that overlay or softlight usually do the trick.

OK, so now you have your basic background. Now you can do one of three things: use it as is in a digital collage or scrapbook project;  go on to making another background, and another and another, then collageing them together to obtain a fourth, more intricate background; or enrich what you have done with ’stamps’, lettering and scraps of ephemera, much as you would with your painted one.

The latter is the simplest option to obtain a jazzier background. I regularly scan my ephemera, then copy and past portions of it on my background canvas. Once I have opened the file containing the piece of ephemera I want to paste into the background, I select a portion of it using the lasso tool. To make sure the selection blends well with the rest of the background, I soften its edges (Select–>Feather; I find that a radius of 150 is a good one to ensure seamless blending). Again, I adjust opacity and blending mode for the ephemera layer to achieve a pleasing result.

I repeat the process several times with other ephemera scans, until I have a background I like. The finishing touch is usually ’stamping’ it  with a custom made brush. You can download custom brushes for free from various sites, including Brusheezy. Making your own is very easy too, though—I am going to explain how in next week’s tutorial.