Photoshop Art

As I promised myself, I have spent a good part of the day having a good play with Photoshop. I didn't follow any particular course of instruction, but did refer to the beginners' guide of the Focus guides for some help.

I started with an image from a magazine cover (I'm not showing it to you for copyright reasons) and used a lot of cloning, healing and smudging to replace a lot of text  and get more of the colours I wanted. I saved that and used it as the basis of a couple of other pieces.

On the first piece, I then added some brushes, creating a different layer for each brush, so I could delete them later on if I wanted to without having to do it all from scratch again. The first brush I used was from 500mlfossils9. I'm not sure where these came from originally. This site says "created by biteintoacloud" but that may have been the package not the brushes.

The next brushes I used were eyes from avh brushes autumn sonnet. (And yes, I know they are different! A job for another day!)

I then opened a pic I had of some branches, desatuated it, upped the contrast and used the magic wand to select the tree, and then cut it. I pasted it onto a new layer with a transparent background, and resized it to where I wanted it. I used a black paint bucket to make it as dark as possible.

Once I had all the layers, I decided I could merge the brushes with the background. I saved all this as a psd file. I used a layer mask to obscure the branch so I could save a copy without it. I then reverted to the old file, went back through the history until I had deleted the mask, merged all the levels and saved it as a jpg.

With the second pic, I duplicated the layer with the eyes on it ( after I had used some of the tools in the "liquify" filter ) so that I could erase bits etc without losing the original background. I noticed that the bit of branch on the right eyebrow looked like a horn, so I decided to move the one on the left and make it look more like that on the right. By playing around with the layers I was able to cut it from where it was, clone some layer underneath, and line it up with the eyebrow. It still didn't look right so I copied the bottom bit of the right "horn", flipped it and pasted it over the left one. With a bit of erasing and healing, I think it turned out OK.

In the final piece I simply added a mouth using a brush from Obsidian Dawn. I'm not sure about this. The mouths available were all bit too voluptuous for what I was aiming at, and as it goes right over where the fossil is situated, I think it looks too pouty. I need to search for some different mouth brushes.

 

I'm pretty happy with my second Myday. I am learning heaps and loving it. Photoshop is such a brilliant tool. I've gone through what I've done in detail not because I think I've created anything great, but it does show what can be achieved with only a little knowledge and some time to play!

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