"Hands" Digital Collage
by Donal Jolley

My oldest daughter was the hand model for this digital collage created in Photoshop. The warm colors and cascading confetti squares framed a location where type could be placed at a later time as the project developed. It is characteristic of my efforts to design in a "timeless" style that will be as appropriate ten years from now as it would be ten years ago.

By today's standards this is a fairly easy digital collage. When it was created there were no such things as layer effects to enable one-button drop shadows. Multiple layers and layer masks had to be used, and channels meticulously planned and created to achieve the knock-outs and graduated effects.

This image was featured in The Photoshop WOW! CS/CS2 Book, though by the time the CS suite rolled out it was a far simpler thing to achieve.