my pictures (by request)

as requested by The Dr's Wife from Mumsnet, here is a simple tutorial -

Choose your picture you want to use. I have chosen a photo of Lola, in Aberystwyth out side the camera obscurer. 

Find your pen tool for quick selection and highlight the area you want (you may need to use the magic eraser tool to sharpen up edges)

Press ctrl, alt and J – this makes your selection on another layer

Rename your selected area on the new layer as THRESHOLD – you’ll see why in a bit

Now you should have two layers, one called BACKGROUND and one THRESHOLD

Now that we have the main subject on its own layer, we're going to hide the background from view and replace it with a solid colour

First, click on the Background layer to select it. Then, with the Background layer selected, click on the New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:

 Choose a colour you like 

You will now have a solid colour as your back ground 

Next we need to convert the main subject to black and white and remove most of the detail, and we can do that easily using photoshop’s Threshold adjustment. First, click back on the "threshold" layer to select it in the Layers palette. Then, go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, select Adjustments, and then select Threshold. This brings up the Threshold dialog box:

Decide what threshold your picture looks best at, then you may like to play around with the back ground effects to create shadows / patterns etc

 

this is by far not the best, but a quick demo - it's rather simple

finished

these are ones I've done before 

See – simple!