Curio Shelf Tutorial

Curio Shelf

I have a wooden curio shelf on my wall that I display my collection of tiny bone china
animals and small things I collect or that have been given to me. I thought it would
make a lovely, but simple tutorial. So here it is....

#1 You will need a wood pattern for this tutorial.
You can use my Mahogany Tile, below, or one of your own choosing.
(Just right-click and save to your folder.)

#2 Open a New image, 300X300 (you will have room to work with), transparent.
Make the foreground color the wood pattern and the background color Null.
With your Selection Tool, rectangle, make a narrow strip on the left side.
Then flood fill with the wood pattern.

#3 Still selected, add an Inner Bevel with the settings below. If you like this setting,
you can save it as Wood Trim, or name it so that you will remember it's bevel.

Select None.

#4 Again using the Selection Tool, rectangle, select the area just below the top angle and
pull down to just above the bottom angle (look below for guidence).

Go to Selections/Invert then hit your delete key. Select None.

#5 Duplicate, Mirror, Duplicate, Rotate LEFT 90 degrees, making sure All Layers is UNchecked.
Making sure your TOP layer is highlighted, use your Deform Tool to place the bar along the
top and align it with the LEFT upright bar. Then click the CENTER Right node and pull
it to the right to align that side. Click the Mover Tool to turn off the Deform Tool.

#6 With the TOP layer still highlighted, duplicate, flip and move to position at bottom
of side bars. Merge Visible and name this layer FRAME.

#7 With the Magic Wand, Mode ADD, Tolerance 0 and Contiguous CHECKED, click INSDIE the Frame.
Go to Selections/Modify/Expand by 3. New Raster layer, name this BACK. Flood fill with the
Wood pattern, then arrange/Send to Bottom. Select None.

#8 New Raster layer. Selection Tool, rectangle, make a narrow strip from top to bottom of
the Frame. Flood fill with the Wood pattern.

#9 Apply a Drop Shadow with the following settings.

Repeat the Drop Shadow changing the Vertical & Horizontal to (minus) -2. Select None.

#10 Duplicate and move this layer to the right.
Position both layers dividing the inside into three sections.

#11 Hide the FRAME and BACK layers (RED X). Making sure that Raster1 (one of the inside
vertical bars) in Highlighted, Merge/Merge Visible. Duplicate, Rotate RIGHT 90 degrees.
UNhide the FRAME and BACK layers.

#12 With the Copy of Merged layer STILL highlighted, ZOOM in (I zoomed to 300%) so that you
can see the crossbars. Lower the Opacity of this layer to 48 so that you can clearly
see the vertical bars. Using the Eraser Tool, size 5 and the settings below,

erase the FOUR cross sections of the horizontal bars as in the image below.
Be sure to put the Opacity back to 100% when you are done.

#13 Merge/Merge Visible.

#14 Now you can add items to your shelves to make your curio shelf complete, as I have done.

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