character profile

sixth

In today’s lesson, i did some last minute touch ups to my avatar. I ensured there was a shadow to the dead person by double clicking the layer and editing the drop shadow. I then softened the edges as it looked to harsh. To do this, i used a soft brush just to go around the outer parts of the dead person. Then i used the bevel and emboss tool to darken any blood splatters or wounds by double clicking the layer and changing the settings on the bevel and emboss. I also put more blood on my upper lip as Mr Andrews said that it would look better so, i selected different shades of red and painted over my lips some fake blood. 

fifth

In today’s lesson, i moved the avatar into the background. First, i zoomed in on the avatar and clicked on the quick selection tool. I made sure the brush was a hard brush. i clicked and dragged the tool around the outline of my body. This did take a while to do and i found that it would  select areas i didn’t want to be selected. to get rid of this, i held down the alt key and dragged in the areas i didn’t want to be selected. I also used the  Lasso tool on the upper part of my face and around my hair as the quick selection tool wasn’t detecting that area properly. Then i clicked on the refine edge button. I smoothed out the ragged edges by adjusting the smooth to around 20-30. I turned on smart radius and changed it to 1 pixel. I also set the feather to 1 pixel. I made sure to output that image as a new layer with layer mask. Then i used the move tool to drag the image of myself and dragged it to the background that i previously made. I resized and moved the image using the free transform tool. I decided to bring the avatar character closer to the screen a) to cut out the st. hildas logo and b) to make it look as if its from a scene in a horror movie when the zombie pops out at you. I made sure a bit of the middle window was still on show as i didn’t want the avatar to fully cover it. 

fourth

In today’s lesson, i worked on making the background for my avatar and putting the avatar into the background. The main background i decided to use was an abandoned mental hospital room with a bed and three windows. The overall image was already black and white so i didn’t have to fiddle too much with the settings and make it look similar to my own image. I adjusted the brightness. I took 2 images to use in the windows as the windows in the original image weren’t what i wanted. One of them was a park and the other was a canal and trees. I used the free transform tool to resize and move the images to fit on top of the original windows. The two images worked together well and it looks like its from the same place. Then, i looked for a broken window on google as i couldn’t find any that i wanted to work with on flickr. Once i found what i wanted to use, i opened it on photoshop. to make the windows look as if they are each broken in different areas, i used the free transform tool to flip the window or rotate it. Doing this makes it look like i took three different images for the window when really, i only used 1. To finish off the image, i took an image of a dead man off google and put it near the window to make it look as if Erica had just finished her meal. 

left window 

middle and right window

main background

broken window

third

To darken up any wounds and make the blood drips look more realistic, i used the colour picker tool to select colours and darken up the blood splatters. I also changed the colour to royal reds and other shades of red to make the blood look more realistic. I had to make sure to create a new mask on whichever layer i was working on to be able to do this. I then created a new layer and started doing the eyes. I used the pen tool to select the parts of my eyes that i wanted to be black. Then i right clicked the selected area, make selection and left it on the default settings and hit okay. then i clicked select > refine edge to make sure the eye didn’t have jagged edges. I brought up the feathering a little bit to soften the edges and also brought up the contrast. I pressed shift + delete to bring up the fill tool and selected black and hit okay. to deselect i clicked command + D.

 

second

In today’s lesson, i started working on the blood marks that i would use in my avatar. I took a dripping blood effect off of google since i couldn’t find any ones that suited what i wanted to use on flickr or any other creative commons websites and made a new layer. Then i used the free transform tool to resize the image and place it around the area i wanted it to be. I set this on multiply  I clicked the transform button on the top right hand corner of the page on photoshop to distort the blood to a way where it would look as if the blood was dripping out of my mouth. I added a few other blood splatters around the avatar’s face and on the avatar’s shirt. I set all of these blood marks on multiply so it would get rid of the white background and also to make the blood look more realistic. I changed the opacity in some of the blood splatters. 

first lesson making avatar

First off, i opened my image that Mr Andrews took of me on photo shop. It came up with the camera raw automatically and i adjusted my skin tone and overall skin colour on that. Since i was looking for more of a zombie look, i looked at images from the walking dead and grave encounters to see the basic skin colour of a zombie. I edited out any of my imperfections and blemishes using the Healing Brush tool. Since i had dark under eyes in the image, i left it alone as i was looking for the zombie effect and zombie’s usually have darker under eye areas. I then went on to make a new adjustment layer to darken the image even more. to do this, i clicked on Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Black and White. For the reds, i set it to around -140 and the 

yellows to around 100. I left all the other settings at default. I decreased the opacity to around 80% on this layer so it wasn’t too harsh. Then, i took an image from the internet of a wood texture and copied and pasted it onto the image. I used the free transform tool (Command T) to resize the image of the texture and move it around to where i wanted it to go. then, i turned down the opacity. Then i created a new mask on that layer and erased the parts of the texture image that i didn’t want (using a hard brush and the colour black to remove) and left myself with a wound on the top right corner of my forehead. I had two wood textures to choose from and i ended up choosing the second one. 

first

second