Filed under: Design, Fun, Photo, Windows, Macintosh, Adobe, Time-Wasters, Design Tips
Design Tip : Make yourself part of Tom Goes to The Mayor
by Grant Robertson Apr 25th 2007 at 3:30PM
If you've longed to be on Tom Goes to the Mayor but aren't as cool as David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Brian Posehn or any number of other hot alt-comics who've graced the show's two seasons, fear not.. we'll show you how to make your own Tom Goes without flying to Hollywood, or breaking the bank.
The bad news is you'll need Adobe Photoshop, the good news is you won't need any after-market filters. Once you've found a source image of yourself (or anyone else) that you'd like to "Mayorize", you'll need to remove any background elements. The production crew of TGTTM shoot still shots with bright lights on a white "butcher paper" background, but you can just as easily use a wall in your home or apartment. The less variation in your background, the easier it will be to remove using standard techniques. Try using the "Magic Wand" tool and adjusting the tollerance to a very low level (between 10 and 25), selecting and deleting small chunks of your background until you're left with only you and the transparent checkerboard.
Now the fun part, making yourself into a TGTTM character. Set your foreground color to a nice shade of blue, and your background to white, then select Filter->Sketch->Photocopy
The final step is to add yourself to a background. TGTTM uses heavily composited backgrounds made from clipart and illustrations, but you can put your TGTTM-self just about anywhere. Copy and paste yourself into a photo, move your TGTTM character into a viable position and, let the fun begin!
Rats off to ya! Enjoy your time in Jefferton.