Fantasy Digital Portraits

2.3 Manipulating Your References: Male Portrait

Hello and welcome back to fantasy digital portraits. My name is Melody Nieves, and I'm excited to share with you one incredible secret that will help you draw better compositions. For lesson 2.3, manipulating your references, you'll learn how to create a literal interpretation of your original concepts by creating photo manipulations in Photoshop. So, why create a photo manipulation in the first place? Normally, we tend to figure out ideas by doing some light brainstorming and research before sketching them out. Maybe you'll even keep a couple of references close by to make sure you get the angles and details down pat, just like the photo. Now don't get me wrong, there's absolutely no problem with this method. But sometimes it takes a long time before you come up with a solid sketch, and depending on your patience, schedule, or even professional deadlines, it's always a good idea to know another way to create paintings much faster. Usually when you make a photo manipulation, the end result is your artwork. But in this case, we're going to use photo manipulations as the main reference to guide us for our drawings. No longer do you have to juggle multiple windows for different photos or even feel like your idea is incomplete. By creating these photo manipulations, everything you need to know about your future painting is right there in front of you. It's essentially your painting, but just in the form of a quick photo collage. To start our photo manipulation, let's take a look at the references. You'll find links to all the references in this course within the course files. I wanted to make sure you could follow along with this course, so I specifically crafted the portraits after references you could easily find online. In fact, you can download all the images for free via the free stock photography website Pixabay. For the male portrait, we'll need just four references. The first picture is a dramatic shot of an older man with half of his face in shadow. Because of the intense lighting, this shot automatically sets the mood for a seriously fierce concept. The way the light bounces around the face also creates more emphasis on his wrinkles, pores and facial hair. So we'll be able to incorporate these details for that hyper-realistic look. The other great thing about this picture is that it's just a picture of his head. Neither his neck nor the lower part of his body shows in the shot, so it'll work perfectly as that floating head concept we're going for. The next picture is a simple shot of smoke. It billows up from the bottom and swirls elegantly for a nice look. And because of the shape of the smoke,I can already tell that it'll be a nice accessory to the man. Next I was looking for something that resembled the cracked lava. Soon enough, this with the picture I found, and it ends up going perfectly for what I plan to do in the next step. For the last picture, I just wanted to add a little color and texture to the overall manipulation. You can do this easily by applying a simple watercolor texture like the one I discovered here. Now that all the photos are selected, can you guess the idea I have in mind? Like I mentioned before, I wanted to create two powerful fantasy characters, and for the male portrait I've decided on creating one influenced by fire and smoke. To see what I mean, here's the final result of the photo manipulation. Now let's take a closer look of each layer to see how I got to this result. I made this photo manipulation using the same document the portrait already comes in. However, I adjusted the canvas size to be longer in height so that it's 426 by 640 pixels. Then I filled a new background layer at the bottom with the color black and left the man's face where it was so that it's still hugging the upper area of the canvas. Next, I selected the face layer and went to image adjustments, human saturation, and brought down the saturation to -100. I added the smoke to the composition by copy and pasting the reference onto the document. Then I set its blend mode to lighten, and resize the image to cover the man's face by hitting Ctrl+T to free transform it. Once the smoke was in a position I liked, I took an eraser to the right side of the man's face to uncover the areas that got lost in the smoke. The next layer I've got hidden away is the layer for the lava cracks. Once I unhide the visibility of this layer, you can see that I positioned the lava to cover the right side of his face. I've set the blend mode of the layer to screen and erased any parts of the image that were covering unwanted areas. My main concern was to draw focus to his right eye by surrounding it with these lava cracks. I also thought it would be a great addition to making him seem like a fierce character that was made from fire and smoke. Above all of these layers I copy and pasted the watercolor image. By sending the blend more to color burn and bringing the opacity of the layer down to 25%, you can now notice that all the details get a nice blue tone to them. Once you're finished with the watercolor texture, this becomes the final result. Here are a couple things to note about this photo manipulation. It is totally all right if the final result doesn't look as clean as you'd like it because we're only using it as a reference for how we would like to draw all of these details. Now of course you could just look at the images individually. But then you have to really figure out how they all come together for one cohesive drawing. It's also all right if the format of your photo manipulations don't quite match the size of your digital paintings. You don't want a large file to slow down your computer or potentially make Photoshop crash, so try to keep the file size low by just taking advantage of what you have here. This concludes the process to create the perfect painting reference for the male fantasy portrait. Now, let's take a look at some more references, and see what we can put together for that powerful female character I had in mind. So, join me in our next lesson, where I'll show you how to create another photo manipulation, perfect for the female fantasy portrait.