How could i possibly achieve THIS effect?

Hi! I've been trying to make something similar to prefuse 73's album cover for "one word extinguisher" (http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00008PRRJ.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg).

my biggest problems so far have been filling each character with a different color that still looks soft and semi opaque while still blending harmoniously with the pastel background color and the colors of other characters, as well as being able to select every colored bit of each character including soft antialiased pixels and changing their colors. when selecting by color range, PS excludes some grey antialiased pixels that ruin the images when they're colored and make the images look jagged when they're deleted.

is there a selection technique i'm overlooking, or should i try a wholly different approach? i would really appreciate the help, and i'm sure others in the future would be interested in making this kind of stuff. if anyone tries something, i'd love to see the results.

alec

[email]alecimago@hotmail.co[/email]

Here's some tips, use masks instead of deleting them directly. Use the blur brush to remove part of the image you wish to remove. Do the images seperately and use the Hue/Saturation > Colorise option to make each one a different color.

Make them as seperate layers, and play around with each layer's opacity. The colors on the image are added using the blur brushes(I guess). If you have sample images, I can play around and show you a sample.