Initially I was
going to follow the directions for making an ‘avatar’ character from the Hollywood
movie. However, as I was working on the silly pic I chose, practicing the new
techniques, I changed horses in midrace. While I was working with the
dodge/burn tool, I decided I might want to try making a classic vampire-like
character instead. I planned to make a comedic version since I was using such a
silly picture. As I was working my way through the construction I altered the
picture further to turn my silly original expression into a more classic-aged
vampire facial appearance.
Once
I was certain I was creating a vampire avatar, I started with my background,
looking for a castle or medieval scenery. My chosen background picture I flipped
horizontally and then darkened until I was happy with the depth of shadow in
the buildings (the sky was still too bright but I fixed that later).
For
the image of myself, I cropped it from the larger picture, then erased all the
exterior details to interpose overtop of the medieval church scene. From here,
I had a rather long experimentation with the dodge/burn tool, to extract the
correct paleness in the skin and darkening of my blonde hair. In contrast to
the rest of my flesh tones, I darkened the skin around the eyes, to give them a
sunken look.
Finally
happy with my darker hair and pale skin I began to work on the eyes. I slightly
enlarged both eyes, and then each Iris, so the eyes would ‘pop’ a bit – become a
focus while looking at the picture. The only detail I was missing at this point
was some nice vampire teeth, which I cropped out of a picture of a tiger, and
after rotating slightly and resizing, was able to fit into my mouth area.
Feeling
I was down to my final steps, I wanted to round out the look and feel of the picture,
so began recoloring and painting. I ended up using three separate layers for
painting, as each had different opacity and fill levels. I changed my eyes to
red, lowering the opacity to allow my natural glint to shine through the new
color. For my teeth, I added some blood, as well as some blue-tone to shadow
the white. On the same layer as the teeth, I painted a dark-blue hue throughout
what remained of the lighter areas in my hair, going for a Raven-black look. On
the 3rd layer, I applied a darker blue over the sky, to give a
feeling of dusk or early evening, which I still had to darken, slightly, after
adjusting the opacity and fill, before I was happy with it.
I feel the image is effective, for what it is,
having grown up on old B&W and early color Dracula movies. The overall image
captures the ‘feel’ of that movie genre. By the time the project was finished,
I had altered everything in the picture in some way, except the shirt. Given
that I started with a silly looking self-image and converted it into an angry
undead, that in no way resembles the original picture, I am happy with the
results.
Note: The tiger
image (teeth) and the medieval church picture (background) were both obtained
through Pixabay.com, a free to use image database.
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