Avatar - Self Portrait

 

This was a really fun project. I feel like I learned so much from following the tutorial. I can see how these techniques could apply outside of making someone into an avatar. I especially enjoyed using burn and dodge to create all of this detail and depth to the picture. 

At the start of the tutorial the instructor mentions eye lighting. So I tried to take a picture of myself where these eyes are very well lit with the goal of making the giant avatar eyes really stand out. I wish my phone was able to capture even more detail in the eyes. I think this could've really enhanced the effect. Once I made the iris larger it really stood out how soft the finer details were. However, using the Burn and Dodge tool was quite effective at salvaging this. I was pretty surprised at how much detail I was able to add back in to the image. 

After using the burn and bodge tool to bring back lost eye details 

One thing that I am particularly proud of is the "red" beard. When I first went through the exercise of creating this avatar character the beard was very tricky to work with. It was very difficult to blend the blue skin tone into the color of the beard. It was hard for me to imagine that a creature with blue skin would have my reddish/blondish beard color so I turned the whole beard blue because it felt like it made more sense. I felt like the blue beard was successful but it no longer looked like ME. 

  blue beard version       

So I found the original layer and removed the blue from the beard which left me with a very strange contrast of golden hair and blue skin and it was looking pretty sloppy. I used a channel filter to isolate just some of the red parts of the beard. Then I layered that on top of the blue beard so that just some highlights of the beard were red. Next I used a color balance on the red beard layer to bring out some of the blues blues to try and blend it with the image. 

copper beard version 

The result was this really nice blue-ish copper color which feels like translates really well. In other words, if I was turned into an Avatar I think my reddish blonde beard would be copper and not blonde or blue. The effect on the hair is as if most of my beard is a dark blue but some of the hairs have a copper highlight. The only problem is now I will never look at my beard the same way.