Hibiscus Dress

One evening a couple weeks ago Janell said to me, "it would be cool to have a dress that look like this hibiscus flower." And I said, "just a sec. Let me take a couple quick photos..." And here's the result. This picture was more for the sake of visualizing the concept of a "flower dress" for Janell than for the believability/Photoshop-skills factor. But I think it's still quite convincing -- at least at a glance.

30 Years Younger

I wasn't exactly sure if this would even work when I started, but I think it turned out quite nicely. Not bad for an afternoon project. Here's a breakdown of what I did to make her younger:

• smoothed her skin
• made nose and ear smaller
• straightened nose
  
• raised & straightened jawline
• enlarged eyes and brought them forward
• added definition to the eyes
  
• added eyebrows
• lifted & colored hair
• lowered shoulders

The REAL Little Mermaid

Unlike the statue of David that I colored, here I turned Denmark's Little Mermaid into a "real" mermaid using pieces from real photos of women & fish. I still haven't completely mastered shadows yet, but I am VERY satisfied with how realistic the wet rock turned out.

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The REAL David

Having changed the ethnicity of two models (white to black & black to white) I decided to bring a stone statue to life. Adding skin color to a mid-tone gray statue was much easier than making a white person black or visa versa. While the skin turned out pretty well, the hair still looks rather sculpted. I added some realistic looking hair to David's legs and also added some beard definition to his face. The final effect turned out so well I felt as though I needed to censor it. But if you want to see the whole thing you can click on the image to see all of David.

Bush Behind Bars

This is a good demonstration of "juxtaposition" -- The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development. I thought that Bush needed a little "character development".

The thing that I found most challenging with this picture was the shadows from the bars. It's quite hard to realistically "fake" a shadow.

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Race [white to black]

Having previously conducted an experiment where I digitally changed the ethnicity of a black woman, I decided to do the same with a famous Caucasian celebrity. Naturally I chose Paris Hilton.

Drastically changing someone's skin color is more challenging than you might think. Different shades of skin effect light differently so in order to acquire a semi-convincing shade of brown I had to use multiple skin color layers, each one having a unique layer effect -- one effecting color, one focusing on the tone of the shadows, one for highlights, etc... It's not perfect but I think it's fairly believable.

The hardest part was actually changing Paris' hair -- painting out her original blond hair -- and then adding a more convincing quaffer, taken from a Tira Banks photo.

Race [black to white]

I suppose I should mention that my inspiration for this blog comes directly from the awesome contests at Worth1000.com. I've seen lots of different creative ideas at Worth1000, but don't remember seeing anything along the lines of changing one's ethnicity. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see how easy (or hard) it would be to drastically change someone's skin color and maybe slightly modify a few features.

Apocalypse Now [Iraq]

"The horror... The horror..."

I got this idea late one night and could sleep until I finished it. It was actually quite simple relatively speaking. I'm sad to say that it was far too easy finding actual current photos to remake this classic Vietnam War war flick...

Once I had all the photos in place I had to match the colors & artistic style, etc. It wasn't too difficult.

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Angelina Jolie [Fight Club]

Jumping on the Brangelina bandwagon, I decided to try my own hand at a Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie mash-up.

On this project I basically just replaced Brad's head and body with Angelina's, but retained his hands & hair. I did however soften the hands and arms to make them appear more feminine. I'm happy with how well the scrape on her face turned out, but am not so sure how well her posture and his hands match up, but it's not too bad I guess...

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Laurel & Hardy [take 2]

Here is a modern take on the classic duo of bumbling buffoons.

This was the first phototweak I did for this blog so I decided to start out with an easy one. I simply replaced the faces -- nothing too difficult. But I think it turned out pretty well. It's not perfect but it still makes me laugh. I find it funny on several different levels.

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