This is my first tutorial, so may 'jabber on' a bit. If anything needs clearing up, please PM me.Step 1Find an image of denim, there are literally hundred on the net (I went to Deviantart for this one) and adjust to your liking, I increased the contrast and turned it from blue to black by desaturating it. The trick is to make it vivid and eye-catching. Take time getting this bit right as it is the base for the whole image.Step 2 - The ghost
The ghosts are a simple shape, find any image of them and create a selection shaped as their outline. Copy the denim layer and then use your selection you made to create a mask, its important to do this as erasing won't work in the next step. Then you want to make it 'jump' from the background, easy to do so just add a small drop shadow, an outer glow in black (set to multiply) and bevel and emboss. Rotate the denim (without moving the mask) to ensure the direction of the threads is different, this is very important to realism.
Step 3 - Edging
Next, use a brush (default set, 4th from bottom) on the mask to reveal 'threads', which can be easily made by chaotically brushing the edges, as seen here. Subtlety is key here, don't go too far from the edge.Step 4 - Stitching
This is the time-consuming bit, create a new layer and copy the previous layer style and paste to this new layer. Then take a light grey brush, about 3px wide (depending on overall size of the image, just experiment until it looks right) and carefully, slowly draw in the stitching, trying to vary the angles slightly. Then reduce the drop shadow until it looks right.Step 5 - Eyes
Find some nice images of buttons and simply use your selection tools to select one and bring it to a new layer on your image and once again copy the same layer style used previously, this time turn off the outer glow and increase the distance/size of the drop shadow, as the button stands off the ghost further than the stitching. After that, repeat step 4 on the buttons to 'sew' them into place. That's our first ghost finished!Step 5 - rinse and repeat
To create the other ghosts, simply group all the ghost layers you just made then copy them as many times as you need, then its just a case of opening the copied group and selecting the denim texture, rotating it to change the thread direction and changing the hue, don't forget to click 'colorize' to get vivid colors. I chose to change the buttons as well, so I just repeated step 5. Also, for added realism you could manually re-do the stitching so it doesn't match the first ghost, as I did.Pacman was made using the same method, but without the eyes.Of course this could be used to make all sorts of shapes on all sorts of textures, I hope you enjoyed my first tutorial. :)[Edited by User on 8/30/2011 5:00:44 AM][Edited by User on 9/2/2011 8:32:16 PM]