Jacquelin Vanderwood
April 2005
So what is a mask? Well, suppose you have a piece of plastic and you cut out a circle. What you then have is two mattes, the inner circle which was cut out and the outer edge of the circle. Both are used as templates to block out color when airbrushing. We can create a mask in any shape or form imaginable. Photoshop also supplies mattes in the form of shapes. With Paths selected, you can make the form of the mask by placing the shape onto the page by dragging.
I've decided to use the shape below as an example for this step of the process. I dragged the shape within the page. To make the shape active, hit Enter.
Here is the active mask already for us to airbrush.
I'll choose a 75 pixel round brush with an Opacity of 47%, a Flow of 100%, and the airbrush checked in the on position.
Paint around the edges as shown below.
Now deselect it and view the shape.
Let's use the butterfly shape as a mask.
Hit Enter to activate the shape. This time invert the selection by choosing Control+Shift+I.
Using the same airbrush but a different color, spray around the shape.
Invert it again and spray a couple of colors inside the butterfly.
To save the mask, click inside the layer in Paths and rename it.
We can then reselect the mask and invert it to apply a shadow to it using the form we saved in Paths.
We can then reselect it and spray
If we want to enlarge the mask, the selection to make would be Expand. This would be like cutting out the butterfly in an even larger area.
Here we can see the expanded version of the mask.
We can even move the mask around and respray color.
As you can see, you can create all types of mask, move them around, use the inner mask or the outer mask and expand the size of the mask for airbrushing purposes.
Copyright (c) 2005, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved
