Winner's Invitation Tutorial, Challenge 91, by pensnest

[pensnest]

This icon was made in PS CS3 on a Mac. It uses a couple of filters.


Now this was quite interesting, being one of those happy accidents that just come along sometimes.

In order to get the crop I wanted, I selected quite a large area including his head, opened a 100x100 new document, copied in my selection, and resized and rotated it until I got this base.



I copied the base three times. The lowest layer was set to Multiply; to the next I applied a Gaussian Blur (Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur) at 4.0; the uppermost I desaturated (Image>Adjustments>Desaturate) and set to Soft Light. This is a base-refining technique I picked up a long time ago, and I'm usually pretty happy with how it turns out. The Gaussian Blur adds a sort of luminous quality and the desaturation stops it getting too vivid.



I did an Amalgamation layer to merge everything so far (Cmd, Alt, Shift+E on a new layer), then copied this amalgamated layer and played about with Filters. In fact, I copied the amalgamated layer a few times, applying a Filter to the copy, until I had something I was pleased with. I was looking for some kind of 'artistic' effect to give the impression of a painting.

What I ended up using was the Filter>Artistic>Rough Pastels filter, with the background set to Brick and a Stroke of 4. Somewhat to my surprise it gave an effect as though there were almost-legible writing on the face, and I liked it.



I then decided on a Gradient Map (I'm very fond of these), and used 2a3561 (a purplish dark blue)/f2e8cb (cream). Here's the effect, on the layers without the filter.



I moved the Filtered layer over the Gradient Map, set it to Soft Light, and decided it was pretty cool. So there we are.