Have you ever seen a photo illustration and said to yourself, “man, I wish I knew how to do that.”
Guess what? You don’t have to be a trained artist to develop a neat photo illustration. All you need is a camera, some tools and imagination. The example to the left is a perfect example.
In this example, my publisher asked me to do a centerpiece (yes, I wrote the story too!) about improving real estate market conditions.
The only tools I used were my work issued camera, a hammer and some nails. I arranged them on the hardwood floor at home and shot several photos, rearranging the hammer and nails each time, all the while thinking of this photo as my “canvas.” On the news page, I added a drop shadow to make it pop.
The secondary photo at the bottom left is a mundane photo of a home under construction. I used text boxes in Quark to design the basic bar graph.
From here, all I did was create an angled text box across the floor photo, giving it a 10 degree tilt. The box is has a white color fill and set at 80 percent opacity, giving it a transparent look.
So you see? You don’t need to spend hours in Adobe Illustrator drawing an image from scratch. All you need are a few tools and ingenuity.
Michael Shawn Smith is the editor of the Carolina Forest Chronicle newspaper in Myrtle Beach, S.C. He’s also the author of Reporting & Community Journalism and Confessions of a Community Journalist. Both books can be purchased on Amazon.
Michael S. Smith Author 