Did you guys miss me? I've been out and about for a little while and lost track of things computer related. Came back to GIMP with a fresh eye and this is the result.

The idea was to completely rework an image from scratch so I started with this one here...


...and turned it into this geisha.


Hope that makes up for my extended absence.

Hi EK22,

you are back !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yay !

I was wondering where you've been. I think i saw you once briefly online and wanted to make a thread about what happened to you, but was afraid you wouldnt see it.

That Geisha piece is awesome, i have no idea how you made it, because its perfect !

Funny thing about the girl is that i recognized her, but didnt remember at first from where.
Google search helped....
she is a model, Devon Aoki and i saw her on the cover of Face magazine in the 90ies for an Alexander McQueen feature in a similar makeup:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0cbn ... r6_500.jpg

Was that the inspiration ?

Its very similar to the Björk cover from 'Homogenic'.

Tell us how you made that awesome piece, please, please, please !

No.

Seriously though, welcome back. You're getting some good results there.

Wow, ek22, that is looking great. BTW, are you using Gimp for your blending or MyPaint? You did a really nice job on that.
Welcome back and I missed y'all too.

ek22: oh, you were gone? didn't notice
that geisha is just lovely! you've got everything looking so flawless!
i agree with esper that it looks a lot like björk on the "homogenic" cover and i also want to know how you made it - probably by using magic.

It's good to be back y'all.

Uhm so to answer all these questions. No, I was not inspired by Bjork, but looking at her album cover I can see why you'd think that. Actually the process that went into this started as a simple touch up, just for practice. Then I kept going and it evolved on me. It's basically a lot of smoothing, some wavelet decomposing going on and a lot of layer blending. Heavy on the masks and layer modes and voila. So maybe magic? I sat here with this piece for 2 solid days and gave myself tendinitis lol.

I only use gimp for my work, I never even touched mypaint, I can't get solid with it and I think it maybe has a personal grudge against me.

What tool do you do most of your blending with. I am having a heck of a time getting the skin tones smooth. I think I have used over half the tools in MyPaint, and still can't get it smooth. I go back and forth from MyPaint to Gimp. Love your sig

molly: I use a lot of grain merge , airbrush and multiply with some gaussian blur to make the makeup parts. To get rid of freckles and blemishes I pretty much followed the wavelet decompose tutorial to a t.

I can maybe try to throw together a tutorial for makeup blending as it's a little touchy in places depending on the original you're working with.

Essentially, you duplicate the layer of the image, change the color to what you need (in this case it was a lot of red) and then set the mode to grain merge or overlay, depending on how strong you need it to be. Then add a black layer mask and start airbrushing (with the airbrush tool, very diffuse settings to just barely breathe on it) and finally use gaussian blur to smoothe the airbrushed areas on the layer mask. The result is this fine mist makeup powder quality.

Thank you EK. I guess I better get back to doing more in Gimp cuz I think it will take a while to get used to MyPaint. I forgot about the air brush.

Airbrush in conjunction with layer mask is extremely powerful for these subtle touches of color. Since I've kind of immersed myself in the retouching area it's been an invaluable tool for me.

Back with a bang....

Excellent work on the photo, if you hadn't of shown the before and after I would not of even consider it to a photo manip.

Ek22,

Interesting this transformation was really convincing! Beautiful edition! I hope you continue with more such posts!