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Turning people into statues How I made the Anthony Hopkins bust. By Norrit Paginated View A few people wanted me to share how I created my Anthony Hopkins Bust for Future Memorials 7. The technique I used is different from the methods presented in the other two statue tutorials posted here, and I hope some of you can find my technique useful.
Page 1 : Sources The key to success is (as always) to find good sources to work with. One of the hardest things to deal with when you are creating a statue is turning the hair into stone (or bronze, or gold or whatever). If you are hoping to learn how to achieve this, you will get disappointed. I’ve tried several ways of making the hair look right in the past and failed miserably every time. The easy way around this “hairy” problem is of course to forget your Don King or Donald Trump idea and go for Bruce Willis instead. If you don’t want to base your statue on a bald celebrity, try to find a source that has the hair you are looking for. I never decide what celebrity I will use beforehand. When I find a good source I ask myself “What celebrity has hair like that?”. (Too bad everyone in ancient Greece and Rome seemed to have super curly hair. If you don’t want to do 218 Frodo statues). For my Hopkins bust, I used this source:
Looks pretty much like Hopkins’ hairdo, right? Maybe Nicolas Cage could work too. And maybe a few more. Anyway, Hopkins was my choice and fortunately I managed to find a good source pic of him:
Page 2: Positioning and Masking Ok, we have found good sources which means 50% of our work is done. :o) Time to align the layers. Lower the opacity on the Hopkins layer and make sure the hairlines are aligned. Resize his face if you have to. Don’t worry about the eyes, nose and mouth being off. We will keep the whole lower part of Hokpins’s face for this project so it doesn’t really matter. Remember to make a copy of the Hopkins source, you will need it later. I decided to mask out the background behind the statue. The boat doesn’t make sense so I go for a plain black background instead (by placing an all black layer below the statue layer). The disturbing metal pipe was removed with the clone tool. I also mask out the parts of his face I don’t need, using a very soft brush. These steps leave me with this:
Page 3: Smudging Here comes the most important step. We have to lose some of his face texture to make him more statue-like (even if DerAlt tells you wrinkles don’t hurt). For this, I use the smudge tool with the pressure set to about 30%. I use short strokes and try to follow his facial lines so the shadows don’t get too messed up. Don’t overdo do it or he will end up looking too blurry and almost rendered. Here’s a before and after shot to give you the idea of what we are trying to achieve:
Page 4: High-pass filter Ok, time for another little trick. We will use a filter that isn’t used very often (at least not by me) called high-pass. You can find it under filter - other. Set the radius to about 90 pixels and hit ok. Pretty neat, huh?
file:///C|/Worth1000/23.htm (1 van 3)13-6-2006 23:17:31