Combining Images From Small Ones (Exclusive Tutorial)

Have you ever come across a picture that is a composition of a variety of different small things? For example, you see from a distance the image of a landscape or some kind of photograph yet detect that there's something awry. If you get closer to take a better look at the picture, then it turns out that the image indeed consists of many small, independent images. In this tutorial, I will describe a way to create such an image, using fantasy and everybody's favorite image editor: Photoshop.

Here is the example that I made.



Now, the first thing you need to do is to choose the theme or topic that your image will depict. It means that you need to determine what small images will combine to make up the larger one. This can be many portraits working in conjunction to create one larger one; this can be many beer lables, or other products which will combine a landscape. You must create for yourself. I chose a host of flags from different countries, which I combined to create the image of a woman on the background of the American flag.

For starters I will begin by looking for flags of different countries. A search in Google Images typically produces a sufficient number of images. You need to make a collection of various flags such that they are of similar size and juxtaposed with one another, keeping an interval of 1-2 white pixels, or find something that it already compiled in this way.

Here's what I got after few combinings:


Further, you need to create a pattern from this picture. Go to Edit>Define Pattern and give it a name. After this, you can close the picture with the flags.

Using Google Images you can find a girl as well. I liked the model Gisele Bundchen on the backdrop of an American flag. I will apply the technique to this picture.


Open the image in Photoshop. Enlarge it several times. (Image>Image Size... and increase the size 4 times)

Create a new layer and place it under the layer with Gisele. Fill in with the patterns we created earlier. Edit>Fill and use the following settings:



Return to layer with Gisele and set blending mode Hard Light.

That's all, folks. Now if you look at the picture from far away, you will see a female model with the American flag in the background. If you look closer - you will see only a collection of flags of various shades. On the monitor, even on a very large monitor, it doesn't look too hot. However, if you print the image, the effect is more than impressive.