Whip Up A Storm In A Teacup

James Paterson create incredible conceptual art with compositing skills, layers and masks

When you can blend photos together in a convincing way, you open up a world of creative directions in Photoshop. Five different photos make up our composite – there’s the cup image which acts as a base for the others. Then there’s the windswept trees and the wave that fill the teacup, plus two photos of clouds and lightning that have been blended together for the sky. Can you see the seams between each?

The trick is to use layer masks to blend the different images together. We can either use precise masks to cut out objects like the trees, or create gentle transitions to blend together areas like the clouds in the sky.

To build our composite we’ll make use of several free photos found on Pixabay, which is a useful resource for free, high-res photos. If you want to follow along, go to pixabay.com and search for the following image references: 3158852, 3119563, 3191872. We’ve also made use of another excellent source of stunning, rights-free, high-res images: the NASA website (search NASA images for image 381727). Furthermore, you’ll find an image of a teacup amongst the project files.