4.7 Creating a Cool Headdress

Hello, welcome back to Lesson 13 of Creating a Fantasy Book Cover. So in this lesson, we're gonna be finishing off the skull we've added to out spear. As well as fixing the head of our character and on the headdress, add some horns. So first, let's get right into it. So let's bring in these feathers here that we have. So we've gotta make sure above all these layers. We got this skull in here, let's actually name this skull. So let's bring in these feathers here. Called feathers 001 any feathers in the stock images. Ctrl-C, I'm gonna resize it slightly. So to get rid of the white, you could just go to the magic wand, click on here. I'm gonna go to a different route just to show you a different idea, different technique. Go to select, color range, hit on the white, and it will bring this bar up. And you can see that it's, the black is obviously where the mask is, and the white is what it's revealing. So I want to actually invert the mask. So click on invert, and we've got the white is what we're gonna be actually taking out and masking. So let's have a look to see what we can get in here the best. So the fuzziness, let's bring it down a little bit to about 33, range is happy where it is, click okay. Right here on the mask, you can see what it's masked as, pretty good job. Let's actually right click on the mask and go to the fine edge first or fine mask. Let's put it onto on layers, so we can see what it looks like. Let's add some smart radius, and I'll bring up radius slightly. Let's bring down the shift edge down right to zero or close to it. Add in some smooth and some feather. Add some feather to the feather. Add some some contrast and I'm happy with that. Click OK. Okay, and then apply the mask. We didn't need it any more. But before we do that, we need to rasterize the feathers. Right-click, apply mask and we're good to go. Let's hit Ctrl+C and then resize this. We don't need them any bigger than that. Zoom into the skull area. Okay, so now what we're gonna do. Let's put it below the skull first right in the group. So below all the layers and just basically what we're going to do go to lasso tool, select a certain feather, Ctrl+C. Ctrl+V and that will just put it over the top. Ctrl+T and this will place it where we think is best. So, maybe here? Now we're also going to bend it as well, so Edit, Transform, Warp, and that just to make it look a little like it's floating in the wind, so something like that. We have a little bit so there, tick. Do the same for the next one. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Don't worry about naming them too much at the moment. I'm actually gonna flip this, so Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal. And just place it around here. So somewhere like there. Maybe a bit flatter, sort of bring down this point here. Maybe bring it a little smaller to there. The same again for this one here. We'll hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. So where I can put this one. Let's bend it to the left this time. So Edit > Transform. Let's bend it in the middle on this point here. And this point here. Tick. Let's resize that and place it where we think it would look good. Somewhere like there. And again, let's do it to this one, nice color one. Let's add a few of these. These are the best ones, really, the colored ones. So maybe there, Ctrl+J. So it's a duplicate, put one somewhere else. So maybe up here or a bit smaller. Down here. Maybe duplicate again, put it somewhere else. Maybe up here. This time maybe just to distort it slightly. So edit, transform, distort, and just try and get a different look to that one. Okay? And the same on the last leaf, oh the last leaf. The last feather. Place it somewhere just looks good. So I'm not sure where on this one. Maybe down looking down on it. So something like that. You can put some over top as well. So maybe over the top of the skull. But I'm not sure where you would attach them so it might not be a good idea to do that. Unless you want more work. So it depends on how you want it to look. So something like that maybe and then just mask out in the eye. And what you can do, add a shadow to it. So right-click. Blending options. I'm going to drop shadow. And then just add in a shadow as you see fit which will add an effect onto the skull itself. Change the angle so the same light in. Something like that, I'll ask its position. Pass it up a little bit. There I spread on the size and make it a little bit more blurry. By that, looks good, change to multiply, click OK. And it's actually, as you can see if I zoom in, the shadow has gone onto the sky and we don't want that. So to actually change that you could just apply it, like that, and obviously the leaf would disappear in certain areas. So what you can do differently is right-click on Drop Shadow, where it says Drop Shadow. And then hit on Create Layer. Okay? So now that shadow is actually a layer, in its own separate layer. So you can change it as you will. So get the razor tool and just delete it where it hits the sky. We have a nice shadow there, and it looks good. I'm thinking maybe a bit brighter, something like that. Darker it would seem. Something like that, that looks good. Okay, I'm happy with that. So we can leave that now. Let's hide the actual other feathers that we have. And then leave it like that, it looks good. Okay so now we're going to focus on the headdress of our character, our main character. So let's bring in actually this headdress here. Close the skull. This one here is called ostrich because it's part of the ostrich back. Gonna cut out this. Easy way to cut this out, just use the pencil. On this one. Go around the feathers, just really loosely. Okay, and go around to the top, join it up. Make Selection, Refine Edge. Get a really big brush size and just get on the side, and it should hopefully bring in some of those feathers back into the image. Like so, see on the edge, looks good. Contrast shift edge like we've done before. A bit more contrast in this one. Hit OK. Mask. I'm actually gonna apply the mask as well, so right-click, and rasterize that layer. Apply the mask. Ctrl+T. Now we're actually going to need to convert this to a smart object. Now that we've applied the mask, and we'll apply it to the character. So zoom in there. Okay so he was smaller than that. So this basically be like the top of his hat. So zoom in a little bit. Let's change this to exclusion. So we can see where we're putting these feathers. Go to edit, transform, firstly add a perspective. Like that. Now go to edit, transform and then warp and basically warp all this edge. Try and get it so it goes around the side of his head and then comes down to the back. All right, that looks pretty good. Move the top bit here, doesn't look as good. So let's change that. There you go, that looks better already. On this point here. We're probably gonna be getting rid of most of this hair anyway. But I just wanna make sure it covers it just in case we do decide to keep it. May make it a bit more evident. Quite a big hair. There you go, it looks good. Okay, something like this top end, it needs a little bit of work, just at the top. Bring up that point there, a little bit more and this just click on the actual feathers, there we go, bit more rounded like that. Click the tick when you're ready and the good thing about the small object like I've said before. You can actually go back to the warp and that will be exactly how you left it like that. Okay, so go back to normal now. So it looks pretty decent at the moment. Kind of cool, but we need it behind the spear for one and we also don't want it on the forehead. So let's actually invert the mask holding Alt on the keyboard. Let's just get the white and then bring it back to where we think we want it. So I'm gonna actually go down to the hard round and just make sure I'm not gonna go on to the spear. So something like that, maybe pass the spear, if it does go past the spear. There we go. So we can actually make that more evident in a second, add a bit more feathers to the back. Okay so at this point you'll want to download the brush, which I included on the second lesson. It's called the furbrush. I'm going to be using that. Okay so when you download it. You wanna right click and then go to the Settings option, go to Load Brushes and then click on FURBRUSH, wherever you saved it. So that's FURBRUSH down here. So what we're going to do, go to our Options, our Brush Presets. Shape Dynamics, you want to turn off Transfer. Shape Dynamics you want to change to Off or if you're using a tablet use Pen Pressure. I'm not using a tablet for this course. Angle jitter you want to keep the same, roundness keep the same, same with sizing errors keep the same. Everything the same except for turn off transfer and tune off control to off. Now click. Now to actually get some control over this on the mask we're easing the flow down to about 15%. And then go black brush on the hair brush. And what we're doing is just going over the top here. As you can see, what it does is like it's like it emanates, emulates hair. So I was trying make this a bit more hair-like. Good way to raise it. So if you need to tilt it as well to get a bit more angle on the lines, move it that way, like so. Of course you can use the other one as well to actually reveal it. So let's try to do that as well, just to make a bit more difference. You can see when we're using the flow, maybe a bit less. It means that we can control it a lot easier. Actually gonna get rid of this section over here. Want some of these holes to come through. Don't want to be too evident on the character. I just want to have like a nice headdress. Something along these lines. So let's actually erase this bottom. Let's make the brush smaller. And get rid of this edge. Changes angle to the normal on the side. Let's go up. That's the beauty of using this brush. It means that these edges look like actual hairs and not just like you've just gone over it with a soft round or a hard round. That actually made quite a difference, so let's git rid of this area here, I don't like that. There you go. So at the moment, it still looks like it's just placed on there. It's not really getting the right angle. So I'm gonna change the angle again. So this will unlock the link from the thumbnail, the image to the mask on the image. Go back to our warp. Let's play around with it a little bit more. I think that's a little bit more realistic in terms of the angle of the head. Okay so maybe, bring this point down as well. So I'm liking what I'm looking at so maybe this edges well can go a bit to the right. Something like that. Click the tick. Might want to reveal some bits now as well. So let's get back to our white and trying to bring a few more bits of hair.B on your keyboard for brush. Here it is green on the ear. So it looks like this go around the ear, it looks really good there. So we've already sort of got rid of the skull. So we don't want to do that too much. Still trying to rework the skull back into the image a little bit more. Thinking now to get rid of the green on the skull as well, because it's a bit distracting in the front now. Contrasts too much for a hat. Let's do that now. So go to textures, see the textures here, onto that image there, go to the textures and just get rid of that. Use the same brush, it'll be fine. There you go, it looks better. Look like, a good idea at the time but, now that we got you out of the fur, you can always change it, that's fine. Okay, so we start out here. So a few more adjustments along the hair line. So we're gonna bring back some of these on the mask. So, around there. Flow back down to the 9%. So we're gonna bring out some of these here. I can still see the skull through these. It's looking pretty decent. It's a bit more curly at the edge. So it's something like that. Do we want it to cover the whole head like that? Do we want a bit of a gap between it, to bring back some of the sky from the back? I'm not sure. Do what you think's best. Maybe bring it back a little bit, so we can see the shoulder, like that. Yeah, I think that looks better. Not too much, though. Okay, I'm happy with that. So now, let's color it. Now, this is a really weird way to color the hair. Make a new layer. Attach it to the ostrich hair. Get a yellow color. Something like that. Just paint over it. Any old brush, like so. And this is going to be really strange and then change the layer style to saturation. As you can see, what that does is just makes it look like it's from the Amazon, just makes the color's pop which is really awesome. As you can see when you zoom in close it gets a bit pixellated. So to fix that, easy fix, make a new layer. Change the layer solid to color. And then holding ALT on your keyboard click the blue, and just add some more blue in there. Click on the brown, add some more brown, and that easily just gets rid of all of the errors, and that pixelation issues. Got some gold, some orange here, some blue there again. Some brown, yellow. This blends in really well. Also get some, light oranges in there, like so. Okay, so that's looking really good. We got really far on this lesson. So that's it for this lesson. So please join me for the next lesson to continue to finish this course.