Finished!

Right.....so, over the weekend, I worked on my assignment and finished it!!!!!

1. I used hue/saturation to desaturate my skin so it looked like it was actually 'frozen'
2. I added another curve layer in to lighten it up a bit
3. Then, created a new layer called 'Ice Skin Texture' and used 'soft light' to cover my skin with this photo:

4. I created a new layer and cut my lip out

5. I used this picture and put it on 'soft light' and placed it onto my lip, using a particular part of the photo so the leaves can be seen

6. I slightly altered the saturation to make my lip seem bluer and colder

6. Then, I overlaid this picture onto a black background

Ta da! I've finished!! Below is the final result:

:) Fresh Start

This lesson, I had my picture (of me looking serious):

and followed the tutorial on how to make myself look frozen. I rubbed out the bits of hair sticking out because it would be too hard for me to make them look frozen and separate from the background. By the end of the lesson, I had rubbed myself out and created a new layer for curves to make myself look dimmer. 

I worked on it last night also (using the photoshop trial version) and when I got to the part where it said that I had to use the 'frost brush'. I didn't know how to change the brush style so I searched online and found the 'brush presets' list. I looked through and the 'frost brush' was nowhere to be seen. I went back to the tutorial and it had a link to download the brush so I downloaded it and, by the end of the night, I was left with this:

:(

Alright, so this lesson, I got my picture, cut around the head and placed it not the background that I made last lesson. As you can see, it looks very unrealistic and because the picture was too much of a closeup, I didn't really have much of a upper body to work with.

So, I searched on the internet and found a tutorial (the link is in the final evaluation) and I'm going to retake the photo of myself.

(I don't know what's happening with my eyes as the corners of them look on here but on photoshop it looked fine :/)

Change of Idea...

Ok, so at the start of this lesson, I opened up my background and tried to put myself into it. Only then did I realise that the whole thing just....didn't look right.

1. The background was....weird
2. The picture shouldn't have been landscape because if I were to only fit the top half of my body in, it wouldn't take up all the space and thus would lead the whole thing looking weird .... again
3. I shouldn't have liquified the picture last week, instead, I should have put the picture in then liquify the picture

Those are the reasons why I decided to change my reason ^^ apart from the fact that I just didn't think it looked right. Oh, and also, the background didn't look realistic so I decided to use a picture of real snow...at first, it didn't work because all the pictures on the internet had borders and watermarks on them and you had to pay to get ones without the watermark and tab. I was a bit disappointed but then I realised I could actually take the picture and use photoshop to remove the tab and marks, either use the clone tool or masking (rubbing out the watermark area and replacing it with a clear part from a duplicate of the picture).

I downloaded the picture and put it into photoshop and cropped away the tab. I clicked on the watermark and it got selected, so I pressed 'delete' and it came up with this little tab, I clicked 'enter' and the watermark just disappeared!!! Like, the watermark got taken off and the snow underneath was still there!!!! I have no idea what that function is but I love it :)

I just went onto photoshop to try and find out what the function is but unfortunately, for some reason I can't find it....I have no idea why....

Before:

After:

Making the Background - 2

This lesson, I continued working on my background. My friend, Eliza looked at my background and sad that I should add some effects to the flames. So I experimented with different effects and at the end this one worked really well since the tone kind of matches the ice. After that, I asked Mr Powell how I could make it look like that the ice was melting. He played around for a while before telling me that liquify was probably the best option. So for the rest of the lesson, I used a small brush and tried to melt the ice as realistic as possible.

Making the Background

Ok, so last lesson I found the pictures for my assignment this lesson, I went to put the pictures together. After putting the ice picture:

as the background, I imported the flame picture and put it ontop of the ice. I dragged it to the bottom and the flames only lined up about half of the background because it was too thin to cover the whole thing. I tried to solve it by duplicating the image and putting the two flames together to create a longer one but when I duplicated, the second version of the flames kept on going to another layer which made the process difficult since it was difficult to position the flames in the right place. I asked Mr Powell to show me and he taught me a trick that was really cool, basically, what you do is first you put the pictures together then you merge them so they become one picture. I did what he showed me and this is what I had by the end of the lesson:

Here is a rose I edited for my mum's birthday:

Getting Started!

Finally I got started on my semi-new idea today!

So after last lesson, I had a thought about my idea and decided that I wanted to keep the 'whole' ice idea but change some aspects of it. Instead of putting myself into/onto and iceberg, I am going to put me into ice. I want to take a picture of my face melt it into the surface of ice so it looks like I'm trapped below the surface. Then, after that, I want to line flames up at the bottom of the picture and make the ice look like it was melting by using liquify. Afterwards, I would rub the area of the picture above the flames out using 20-30% opacity and flow, raising both by 10% the further I rub up the picture. This is symbolizing that the ice is melting and revealing my true personality. It doesn't necessarily mean that I have a 'fake' surface, it just means that sometimes I may seem a way on the outside but is actually feeling another way inside.

So, I did some searching on the internet to put myself behind and didn't really find suitable pictures; some of the ones I found were alright but none were perfect for my idea:

After searching for 'snow caves' or 'snow', I resorted to searching 'ice background textures' and found this ^^ picture and the picture below. I debated on which one to use and decided to use the blue one because I think it looks better and will probably have a better effect in the overall design.

Next, I tried to find pictures of flames that I could place at the bottom of the ice picture ^^ to make it look like it's burning..... the choices were limited since most of the flames were either full screen or looked fake. In the end, I found this one: