I have just returned from Photoshop World in Orlando and I am full of inspiration for upcoming projects. However one of the classes just inspired me so much that I had to start playing with the concept first. The idea is from Kevin Ames who taught it as a class called Fantastic Portraits…It’s Smoke, Mirrors & Photoshop.

The starting point is half a face, mirrored and stuck back together and then it’s up to you. This is my finished project – it’s a tiny file as I did it on the plane home and I really wanted to conserve battery but still get a reasonable result. With smaller images in Photoshop, of course everything goes much faster but the downside is that the final image is less useful because it is very small.

Here in addition to mirroring the face, I replaced the lips, pupils and part of the nose to get the face I wanted. I used the liquify filter repeatedly to reshape the face and the dodge and burn tools to add highlights and shadows – my additon to the basic concept. Then I brushed on the dots, added lots of backround interest and fashioned her a gold necklet. It helps if you have lots of textures and other interesting elements to use – for example, her hat is a fancy street light from a local park and there is a metal grate, a stairwell and a rusty texture making up the background.

It is a fun way to blow a few hours.

If you’re interested, here’s my starting image (courtesy of my friend Brenda), as you can see, the journey from start to end gave me something totally unrecognizable.

Helen Bradley