Merde! How I twisted the chess board

The idea for this digital collage came from the quote - I read it in a novel and it stayed with me. To illustrate what the quote meant to me I wanted to create a chessboard world, and I saw it floating on a bed of clouds. That was fairly easy - I had an image in my stock folder that would suffice.

The chessboard itself was another stock image, but I needed to bend it to suit my purpose. The obvious choice was the Geometric Effects/Circle tool in Effects on the drop down menu at the top of the PSP workscreen. But it looked too pat and too perfect and I wanted something more warped.

The answer was the Mesh Warp Tool, of course. This tool sets a grid over the image which you can resize to a wide or fine mesh, and by pulling or pushing on the points within the mesh you can warp the image into any shape you want.

The Mesh Warp Tool is one of the Deform Tools on the toolbar. It is fun to play with, as well as being a useful solution to an image warping problem that can't be solved using the Geometric or Distortion Effects tools on the drop down Effects toolbar.