Texture Overlay - Chia Pet
Leeloo did not mind me using her perfectly good image for this...
There were a lot of steps involved in this one. I took the base image of the cat into PS CS4, then also opened a shot I had taken of some ground cover. I knew it would come in handy some day!
Using the "chia" image as the source for my cloning stamp, I painted the green stuff onto the cat image avoiding the eyes, nose, and mouth which I cleaned up later with the eraser tool. I used the "clone source" panel to size the foliage down to a size that was appropriate for the image. When I had the coverage that I wanted, I used the liquify tool to shape the facial structure into the chia layer. I used the "bloat" and "pucker" tools to make ridges and valleys which follow the contours of the face. I also did some dodging and burning to add light to the higher parts of the face and shadow under the cheek bones.
Once that was done, I chose a blend mode of "linear light" for the chia layer and adjusted the opacity. Some curves and saturation tweaks to get the look I wanted and then cleaned up the whole image with the eraser and clone tools. Sorry I couldn't do much about the background, as I would have lost her whiskers if I tried anything really cool, like a solid black bg which looks very cool except the whiskers disappear at the edge of her face!
Hope you like this example of hand-painting a texture onto an image. It's my first try at it. :)
