Hip to be Square: Creating & Using Mosaic Backgrounds is one of my photography/design tutorials from my blog A Musing. (If you happened to see my Ombré Rose portfolio item, that’s a really good example of one way I apply this mosaic technique.)

[Excerpt]

Filed under Good News & Bad News: The good news is that Shutterstock, one of the largest stock photography companies, has accepted my work to sell on their site! Why sell on Shutterstock? Well, primarily because they do the work of formatting my images in a range of sizes, making it easy to find just what you need, and also because they reach a huge world-wide marketplace. Good news, indeed.

The bad news? Shutterstock sells stock images— by definition, fairly generic stuff (meaning images that have maximum versatility), and they also only accept the highest image quality. As they should. What that means for me is that a lot of my photos simply don’t fit into their definition of stock content, and even some of what I consider my best work doesn’t meet their quality standards. It’s gotten a little depressing seeing all those “Not approved” e-mails, after all the work of formatting, uploading, and writing descriptions and tags.

But wait— there’s more good news! I decided to take all my rejected photos and do something else with them (as I am wont to do). This time, I thought I’d turn them into mosaics to be used as backgrounds. So I’ll show you how to do that, and (bonus!) I’ll give you some ideas for how to use your cool mosaic backgrounds!

Read the complete tutorial on A Musing!