How to Make a Ship in Bottle in Fireworks

If you would like to put a ship in a bottle, but have no modeling skills and can't glue small pieces together without making a mess, you're in luck. With a little out-of-the-box thinking, you can build your ship, digitally, using a graphics application like Fireworks.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Find an image of a transparent bottle and an image of a ship. A number of stock photo sites offer high resolution images for free or at very low cost. Choose carefully, you want the body of the bottle to be big enough to fit the ship.

2. Make the image size and pixel resolution compatible. You may need to scale one of the images using the image size command. Make sure the ship isn't so small it will be dwarfed by the bottle because you never want to enlarge digital selections.

3. Open the bottle image in Fireworks. Use the "Import" command in the File Menu to bring the ship into the file. The cursor will change to a rectangle corner. Click where you want to place the ship and it will drop into place in a new layer.

4. Edit the ship. Rotate it and scale it into position. Use the selection tool to select and delete any unwanted background elements.

5. Select the bottle shape from the bottle layer. Copy and paste it into a new layer. Drag the duplicated bottle selection to the top layer (you can rearrange layers with the Layers palette.)

6. Change the top layer's blend mode. Click the word "Normal" at the top of the Layers palette to reveal a list of layer blend effects. "Soft Light" or "Overlay" usually produce the best effects, but you can experiment with other modes.

7. Tweak the layer opacity. The value is displayed in the field next to the blend modes menu. You will have to experiment to get the best look, but you want to be able see the ship through the bottle without losing the bottle outline.

Tips & Warnings

• Rather than deleting unwanted background elements from the ship or bottle layers, you can also mask them from the layer with Fireworks' "Add Mask" feature. Masking keeps the pixels intact but hidden. This allows you to recover any pixels you accidentally removed.
• Once you've mastered the basic trick, try putting the bottle in a photo of a table or mantelpiece. You will have to blend the bottle and refract the photo area behind it to make the picture super realistic.