5 Steps to a Photo Illustration.

A few weeks ago I dragged out of the archives a photo shoot I did with gillykins that was meant for another project that never got off the ground. I had thought that I would spend a couple hours touching this up as a break from some of the fashion work that I was doing at the time. 20 hours later I climbed out of my photoshop coma a bit more ragged but with a good example to to talk about photo Illustrations.



Step 1: Start off Awesome (The Photo Shoot)

They say “you can’t shine shit” and while not entirely true it does get messy so I’d recommend spending your time upfront to get this part right. The better your starting point, the better everything else that follows. Have a message or a feeling that you want your model convey. Communicate to your model how what she’s doing will be translated into the final product. Light your subject in a way that that will make it easy for you to seamlessly blend them into your proposed backdrop. ( note** I did not do that, in this case and paid for it in step 4.)

Step 2: Dig your Grave (Layout)

Depending on your ambition in this part you may be underwhelming yourself or cursing yourself for the next 2 steps. hopefully somewhere in between.

a.Select the photo that you want to use and place it in a frame how you’d like to use it.

b.The next thing I do is draw the horizon line. This is super important! This line helps me place all the parts of the photo illustration in a way that prospectively makes sense. As long as everything shares the same perspective horizon you should be good

c. At this point you can sketch in how you want everything to look. car wreckage here, sunset there, decimated building here…

Step 3: Keep Digging (Placement)

Now that you have your idea the next step is to actually do it. This usually involves a great deal of masking out images, putting them in position and discovering that this isn’t going to work and repeat. If you’re George R.R.Martin this process will take you twenty years so it’s up to you to tell yourself when enough is enough.

Step 4: Fix Everything ( Dodge, Burn and Colour Correct)

You now have everything down and it’s starting to look… well, like a mess. It’s rainbow bright in one corner and the dark night in the other. No sense of depth and you have twenty suns lighting 20 elements separate from one another. Good news, this is the stage where you get to fix all of that. Bad news, this is the stage you get to fix all of that.

I start off with trying to match the colours of each element so that it looks like they are being light by the same colour of light. Next, I dodge and burn to push back the background, add or enhance the highlights and shadows so that it all looks like it’s being illuminated from the same source.

Step 5: Apply your instagram filter. (No, but kinda yes)

More accurately you are investing in a colour pallet, unifying your highlights and shadows to have similar colour and tone all in an effort to identify your subject and point of interest. For this Image I choose a cool blue/green dark shadow to contrast the red shiny highlights of the scarlet witch.

In the end, this is obviously not a perfect image. I see loads i’d change and do different, but that’s for future photo illustrations. Everyone is better the next built than what we did before.

So until next time let me know what you liked or didn’t like, and please share with others who might find this interesting.

**note: almost all adjustments, dodging, burning and grading were done curves adjustment layers.





Cosplayer: GillyKins

Photo Assistant: Wendy of Dystropolis