I was surfing the internet the other day and I came across an ad that had an image of a computer monitor with a car looking like it was driving right out of the screen. This is a very cool pop out effect. Although this technically not a 3D drawing, it certainly has the feel of it.
The first thing you will need to do is get a picture of a computer monitor. You can use your own if you like, but there are a lot of these available on the internet. Just do an image search. The effect will be better if the screen is at a bit of an angle. Here is the one I am going to use.
The next thing is to figure out what you are going to use for the image on the monitor. You will want to think about which part of the image you will want to come out of the monitor for the 3D effect. Cars coming at you, or motorcycles make a good choice. Also people with their arms or legs sticking out are also good for the pop out picture. I am going to use the car image below.
As you can see, this picture is much too large to fit on the screen of our monitor picture. I will need to scale it down a little. Select image/Image size and reduce the settings until you have it the way you want it. Never use a picture that is too small to begin with. Unless the resolution is above 72 pixels/inch, the quality will be sacrificed if you try to enlarge the picture. You will have to play around to get it the right size. Unfortunately there is no magic number here. Once you have it the size you want it, use the move tool (Hotkey V) to drag it onto the monitor document as below.
Next, reduce the opacity of the car layer to around 60%. This is just temporary to allow us to see through to the monitor behind.
Now we need to do some transforming to get the perspective right. Select Edit/Transform/Skew. Now you will need to drag the corners of the picture so that the vertical and horizontal lines of the car layer line up with the vertical and horizontal lines of the monitor. This does not have to be exactly perfect, just close. We aren't trying to size it to the screen in this step.
After you have the perspective, move it around so that the entire screen of the monitor is covered. You will need to decide what and how much of the subject is going to pop out of the screen. For mine, I am going to have the the driver side head light and tire area popping out.
I am going to use the Pen Tool to cut the image to fit the monitor screen. This is where the reduced opacity really helps, as you can see through to know where to click. Click around the edges of the screen to select it. Once you get to the 3d area that is popping out, select around it. Go all the way around until you come back to where you started to close the path that the Pen Tool makes. You made need to zoom in and adjust the opacity as you are doing it. Whatever is easiest.
Now that we have a closed path, we will need to change it to a selection. Do this by clicking on the paths tab in the layers palette. Then right click on the work path and choose "Make Selection" with a feather radius of 1 pixel. When you are done click back onto the layers tab.
You should now have the "Dancing Ants" indicating you have a selection.
Next choose Select/Inverse and hit delete. This should delete everything that we don't want in our picture. Hit Ctrl+D to deselect it. Bring the opacity back up to 100% and you are done. Here is what I came up with.
Now that's a 3D monitor! Here are a couple of other ones I did.
