First, create a raw image of the required size. I’ll assume 10G is enough. Using seek creates a sparse file, which saves space.

dd if=/dev/null of=example.img bs=1M seek=10240

Next, create a filesystem on it.

mkfs.ext4 -F example.img

(Note that you need the -F option for mkfs.ext4 to operate on a file as opposed to a disk partition)

Then, mount it.

mkdir /mnt/example
mount -t ext4 -o loop example.img /mnt/example

Now you can copy your files to /mnt/example. Once this is done, unmount it and you can use example.img as a drive in a virtual machine. If you want you can convert it from a raw image to another format like qcow2e using qemu-img, but this isn’t required.