What’s that thing doing here?

Here’s my version of Benjamin J. Grimm (of The Fantastic Four Fame). He’s my favorite, cuz he’s done made with rocks. I like rocks.  Keep scrolling, cuz I gots me sum step by steppage comin’ right after!

Okay. So, as usual, I started with some sketches. I was doing Mr. Grimm here so I started sketching away with abandon!

Too much abandon apparently. What the hell is going on with that guy? Yikes, okay, let’s dial back on whatever it was I was doing there.

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Okaaaay. That’s a little better. I’m still not sure what he’s doing there tho….

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Now that’s working better. A nice simple portrait. This goes better with the techniques I want to use to render him. So I think we’re off!  Wheeeeeeeee!

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I decided I wanted to make him out of real rock textures. So, we drove to a beach that has really way cool rocks bordering on rad, and I snagged a bunch with help from my daughter, and then we scanned them all in on my scanner. At 2400 dpi! Whaaaaaa? Are you nuts?  Yep.

Next I started building it in photoshop. I layered a couple of the rock textures together to create a lovely background. Soooo pretty. What does it mean?

Then I started cutting out pieces of the rock textures that I liked. I also erased out the edges with a rough brush to give them a little more character. Works on dogs and cats too.

Piece by freakin’ piece I added in all the rocky bits. Each of a completely different rock texture. Now they’re all there. But I need to start shading and coloring them so they start making more sense. Right now it looks like someone barfed at a scrapbooking party.

So I started adjusting groups of the rocks, making some more orange, some a little darker, etc. to start to get some separation in the face. Normally that’s very painful, but I think Mr. Grimm can handle it.

I applied a drop shadow layer effect to each individual piece. This gave them a little bit of a cast shadow. Then this next step was very important. In the previous steps I’d purposefully made sure the shapes all over lapped in kind of a haphazardish manner. So now, with the pieces all properly in their place and ordered, I changed their layer styles from “normal” to “soft light”.  This allowed the overlapped edge parts to have that funky cool homemade paper border. Nifty huh?  Here’s a close up of it so you can see that and the slight shadows.

Just like my personality, the shadows needed to be more distinct.  So I merged all the main parts of his face, the brows, nose, eyes, lips, etc. and then hand painted shadows underneath all of them. You can see it makes a pretty big, but subtle difference (like mayonaise over miracle whip)

And here’s the final image again. Awwwww, it’d’nt he cute?