388
W
HEN THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
wanted to illustrate a feature on
pension fraud, they immediately thought of
zombie pensioners. It’s not as daft as it sounds:
it turns out that some unscrupulous relatives
are continuing to claim pensions for long-
dead members of the family, so the idea of a
gruesome grandad isn’t so far-fetched after all.
Whether or not you want to turn your own
ageing relatives into creatures from beyond the
grave, the chances are you’ll want to inflict a
similar scourge on someone you know, even if
it’s only a politician (for example).
It’s not difficult to do, but it is an awful
lot of fun. Here’s how I turned Mr Average
Gray into a grisly grotesque. The only
really surprising thing is not so much that a
conservative newspaper should want to inflict
this sort of imagery on their readers, but that I
actually get paid for doing this stuff.
IMAGE: ABLESTOCK
Zombie pensioners from hell
1
Here’s our starting image: the head
is a cheerful enough chap, placed
on a raincoat body. The key thing here
was the angle of the head, which let
me see the open mouth clearly – all the
better for drooling with.
5
The eye sockets and teeth are
taken from a Hemera Photo-
Objects image of a skull, photographed
from a similar angle to the head. The
rest of the skull is then painted out on a
Layer Mask.
13
Hyper realism
SHORTCUTS
MAC WIN BOTH
389
2
The first step is the basic distortion.
The mouth, nose, ear and eyes
are all distorted using the Liquify filter;
the hair is then messed up using the
Smudge tool for a more wild effect.
HOT TIP
The trick to
making an image
like this work lies
largely in selecting
the right original
photograph. You
need an open
mouth, both to
distort into a leer
and to place rotten
teeth into. If you
don’t have the
right image, you
can try opening a
mouth by splitting
it into two layers
(upper and lower
lips) and distorting
each with Mesh
Warp.
4
The grime is painted on a new
layer, set to Hard Light, using the
head as a clipping mask. Here, we can
add both shading and coloring, using
a soft brush at low opacity. Don’t paint
directly on the head layer!
3
Normally, over-sharpening
an image results in too much
degradation of the original. Which is
exactly what we want here: roll on
Unsharp Mask, with the settings far too
high for conventional use.
6
Irregular selections of the cheek
are made using the Lasso tool.
These are copied to a new layer with
Cj Lj and darkened slightly;
a small bevel, added with Layer Styles,
makes them slightly recessed.
7
The goo inside the face slashes,
and that dribbling out of the
mouth and down the chin onto the coat,
are painted on a new layer, shaded and
textured with the Plastic Wrap filter.
8
The coat is treated in much the
same way, with irregular selections
darkened and shaded; more goo all
round with Plastic Wrap again, and a
couple of nasty-looking spiders for good
measure.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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