Flooded Frame

This is what we will be making

To complete this tutorial you will need:

Flaming Pear's Flood

An eBook of this tutorial and all supplies are here

OK - lets get started

1. Open your image, press shift D to duplicate and close your original. Duplicate your image again and minimize it, we'll need it later.

2. Choose a dark colour from your image for your foreground colour, and a light colour from your image for your background colour. Change your foreground stroke properties to gradient and apply the #1 Foreground-Background preset with an angle of 45 and a repeat of 1.

3. Add a symmetrical white border of 10, click with your magic wand and flood fill with your gradient. While still selected apply the m_champagneivory SBP preset. Invert your selection and apply my main pic preset - or use the settings below. Deselect

4. Add another symmetrical white border of 10, click with your magic wand and flood fill with your gradient - this time go to image>mirror, then apply SBP and deselect.

5. Promote your background to layer, then add a raster layer and drag your image under your new layer. Add 100 height and width to your canvas, then make sure this blank layer is your active layer and select all. Minimize this image for just a minute and bring up the copy we made earlier

6. If you're using another image and not the one I've supplied, resize it down to a reasonable size if needed. The image I used was 400 x 280 and I didn't make it smaller

7. Go to Effects>artistic effects>topography and apply the following settings

8. Now go to Effects>Art media effects>brush strokes and apply the following settings. You can apply sharpen if you think your image can take it. (Adding topography followed by brush strokes makes an awesome background tile too!). Copy your image and minimize again

9. Bring your framed image back up - the background should still be selected, paste into selection, then deselect and turn the visibility of this background layer off

10. Open Flaming Pear's Flood and apply my preset - you will have to adjust the top setting if you're using another image so the water starts where it looks natural. Now open your selection tool - set to rectangle, no feather and draw a rectangle over the area that we've just made look like water - go right to the sides of the image, then promote the selection to layer. Deselect and make your background layer visible again, but keep your top layer as the active layer

11. Using your deformation tool, drag the bottom nodes out and past the edge of your image like below

12. Apply a drop shadow using these settings or my subtle drop shadow preset. Merge all layers

13. Add a symmetrical white border of 10, click with your magic wand and flood fill with your gradient. While still selected apply the m_champagneivory SBP preset.

14. Add another symmetrical white border of 10, click with your magic wand and flood fill with your gradient - this time go to image>mirror, then apply SBP and deselect.

That's it - we're all done!

You also have a very nice background image minimized on your desktop, all you need to do is make it a seamless tile (don't resize though it loses its clarity) so don't forget to save it :)

I hope you enjoyed doing this tutorial as much as I enjoyed writing it