Submission for style I want to explore

I found work on this urban style very challenging and difficult as I didn’t know the best approach how to start. In general, main focus should be on model/head, which will be placed more likely in the middle or on the side and leaving a head room. Than person/head should be connected with a background in some way. Ex: leaks, staines, reducing opacity, layer mask, ….

Background:

At first I choosed simple grunge texture which was later replaced/multiplied by another grunge layer. As default colour was dark blue and bottom layer white, multiply mode turned it into wery stong visible blue color but also with very strong contrast. My final piece suppose to be B&W or dark mode colour. It turned out to be great solution to apply B&W / hue&saturation adjustment layer just for bg, where we keep slightly blue hue.

Creating all elements (except model) could be done by

useing pen tool or ony other tool where we can make a selection, followed by applying patterns, tweaking with opacity, saturation, brightness, …. There is many tutorials out there, I even came a cross a tutorial how to create your own feather,….
useing brushes, what I found much easier. Just need to find the right one which fits for a place, but this can be also done with cutting, moving, rotating , …

So I created layers, where I applied different brushes for feathers, splashes, leaks, staines, ….

All individual shapes were easy to mantain useing layer mask when layers were duplicated . By rotating/inversing/changing colour (cmd+i) those shapes I achieved diversity from each other so I could use them over and over again.

There is not much to tell about process. I have experimented to put all small bits and bobs together to create some shape such as body, arm, hair/darknes, clothes, …. around the model. It was more like few days of long brainstorming as I didn’t have clue what I want to produce, what worked well what didn’t. Even I gave a names to most of the layers and grouped them in folders, it was quite hard to mantain. It was a long ongoing process where I constantly changed position of different parts and different layer modes.

To the end I highlighted right side of face, eyes, shoulder, red lips.

Black&white version seem to be plain and boring compare to colour version which appears to be too bright. B&W / hue&saturation adjustment layers applyed, and tweaking an opacity up to the point, where face just becoming B&W but still keeps live colour.. Even strongly saturated blue bg works much better than pure B&W. As I already found out, brightness settings of different screens on PC/Mac/projectors may change final outcome into darker tone it should be.