Crumbled Lion Face

BEFORE: As you can tell in this picture, my face is obviously photo shopped a bit. What you don't know, is that I took this picture without makeup, and I was sick that day. Also, when you look at the picture, my eye on the left is a copy of my eye on the right. I didn't like the way my eye looked so I changed it, and luckily it worked well and looked rightly placed and real. I used the cloning brush to cover the original eye and eyebrow, then used the largest and highest quality smudge brush that I was able to use, and smudged the skin smoothly together. Afterwards, I blurred everything together to make it not look very choppy. Yes, I know this picture looks off, and that it doesn't look totally realistic, but I don't feel comfortable putting a picture of myself up that looked the way it did before I photo shopped it a bit. I hope you can respect that.

AFTER: It took a lot of effort and small details to concentrate on to make this picture end up the way it did. I had to find pictures of a lion, a henna tattoo, (Yes, I know that part doesn't make sense but I have a weird sense of style. No one really sees henna on a lion) and a picture of high quality bark. I changed the colour of my eyes, from... well whatever colour they are, to a blue colour. To do this, I painted a whole new eye over the existing eye using the paint brush, and used different shades of blue. Then, for the other eye I just copied the blue eye I had already done, and pasted it, and flipped it to fit into the right eye. Then to make it look like it was real-ish, I overlayed it onto my existing eye. Then, I added the henna tattoo. I had to erase the background colour using the paint bucket, and then overlayed it onto my forehead. I do not know why I did this, but this picture kind of reminds me of someone from NARNIA. I wanted to do something different with my face, so I found a picture of bark, and overlayed it on my face as a mask. I had to erase around my face and neck so that they were the only areas of the picture that were "barked." After, using the lion's head, I had to cut around the head using the eraser, and then I transformed it, and sized the picture to it well into my face. I had to burn this picture onto my face. Unfortunately, there was a set back. The face was too orangey and dark to match with the background of the picture, my neck and my hair. So, I found a way to make it work. I went to the Enhancing button, and changed the brightness and contrast. This worked perfectly, and I managed to make it all the same shades and colour. Then, the neck was a bit of a problem. I missed a couple of areas of the neck so I used the lasso and coped and pasted tiny areas into the non-barked areas. Then, to make sure it didn't look so copied and pasted, I blurred and smudged it a bit. I think it worked out well because it brings a bit of depth into the picture. I had some problems with my nose as well. Due to the fact that the lion picture was overlayed, the nose stuck out a bit, so I had to use the smudge brush, and I smudged my nose down and out, to give it more of a lion face, and to match up with the lion nose. I thought my picture was finished but something was still missing. Then I realized, I had a cat on my face but no whiskers. In the end, I used the airbrush in white to brush out whiskers onto my face, which I think was the finishing touch. Hope you find this picture intriguing.

You can think of this picture any way you want it to be, but for me it is that we all have animals inside us that our dying to get out, only, mine is ripping and crumbling to get out. We are all different. Also, if you noticed the lion I used was a male instead of a female. I have nothing against the female lions but I just prefer the male lions. They are fluffier and a lot cuter. :P

- Gorecki.