Mountain Face

This one took a long time to do in Ps, and I am not going to explain every technical part of it. I am going to explain the basic principles of how I made it. It's not done and perfect by any means, but it's far enough along to demonstrate the techniques.

First, you have to get the photo of the face. For this one, I wanted to get pretty even and soft lighting. How you want your photo to look is obviously subjective, so the kind of light you use is determined by what you want the end result to be. I used two big umbrellas to evenly light the whole face. In Lr, I smoothed the skin using the paint mixer tool, and removed and blemishes I didn't like. I left the shape of the face alone.

Now for blending the mountains in. What you need to do is match contours of the mountains to contours of the face. The best example of this is the nose. The ridge line is very nose shaped and so it blends well and is an anchor for the photo. For the mouth, I simply painted black over where the mouth would be and made a trench in the mountains. I let the ridge line follow the general path of the cheek bone as well as the jaw. I used puppet warp a lot to shape the mountain the way I wanted. In the hair, I took a natural looking part and made it match with a valley in the mountain. This made a part, where on one side is the hair, and on the other is the mountain. I had to recreate the eye, and I was in sort of a rush so it's not the best example. I took a whole shape valley and used that for the pupil. I took two curved valleys and used them for the eye lids. It's the general shape of the eye, but I could have done better. It's not toned right or blended that well.

This photo turned out harder than I originally though, and I had to puzzle my way through a lot. I didn't feel it was worth finishing it completely, as I usually do a much better job starting fresh another day. I'm going to have another go at this in the near future for sure.

Until then, see you tomorrow.