Okay, so, as a player of Pen and paper RPGs in my spare time, I often wind up wanting to create representations of my characters, but more often than not find my digital painting skills aren't up to the challenge.
So, when I joined an RP based on "The Matrix" a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a different angle and try editing a photo of a real person instead.
The backstory behind the character is that he was Awakened following a horrific car crash inside the matrix. This left him blind in his left eye, but caused him to realise the Truth about the matrix and the real world - a fair trade in his opinion.
He's a big guy (7'2") who used to work as a historical re-enactor whose specialty was in swords and other medieval weapons. he used to hand-craft them for sale and for demonstration at various renaissance faires around the country. As a result of doing actual forge work, he's pretty strong as well.
After a bit of searching on the net, I found this picture, which
almost precisely matched the image I had in my head for the character's appearance. Namely this:
the two problems I faced involved 1: creating a convincing scar for his face, and 2: lightening the image.
The first step was to convert the image to greyscale
I then used the Burn and Dodge tools, shaped using "feathered" brush shapes such as this one:
to "paint" on light and dark changes to the greyscale version of the face. I also used a pale shade of grey to fill in the left eye, and then the Burn tool to darken the area around the iris and pupil slightly again.
Finally, to restore colour to the face, I blended in the original image as a mask over the greyscale version.
All done using a WACOM graphire. What do you think?
