Photoshop tutorial: The scream

I was inspried by a coworker to practice my Photoshop skills during downtime at work. I consider it honing my skills while waiting for pages to proof. So last night, I looked up Photoshop tutorials and took a crack at one involving smoke and a human protrait.



Instead of going with a woman's face for the image, I decided to replicate something I had seen on Fringe, one of TV's coolest sci-fi shows on right now. The show has certain recurring symbols, and the scream above is one of them. Changing up the steps a bit in the tutorial, I found a man's angry profile on Google images to work from.



From there, I cut out the guy's background and stylized the image so that I was just using the edges of this face as a guide. You can find the full instructions here. I used Photoshop smoke brushes provided by the same webiste, and I manipulated them into the outline of the man's face. After adding a couple filters (clouds, blurs), I overlaid an angry-looking gradiant that reminds me of the colors of fire. The colors are colder when the fire is the hottest. Here is my final project. What do you think? Kind of scary right?



It also kind of reminds me of when Voldemort leaves Professor Quirrel's body in the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie... Yep, I went there.