Photoshop Play: Skull

My birthday coincided with when I started working for Skull-A-Day. My mom bought me a gift certificate for Dick Blick. I bought this skull model from them. It's life size. This is a photo I took when I received it. Recently, I watched "Exit Through the Gift Shop", which is about graffiti artists. One of them made millions selling pop art pieces that he made with Photoshop. I don't know how to make pieces like he did, but I have loved pop art since I first was introduced to Roy Lichtenstein's and Andy Warhol's work, as a kid. I plan on making a pop art skull painting influenced by the cartoon style of Roy Lichtenstein, this week. Andy Warhol has done skull pieces using his screen method, so I didn't want to copy that. Plus, I don't know how to do a screen, but I can probably replicate it with careful painting. Still, I don't want to copy either artist. I wasn't sure how I wanted to do it, so I decided to take the photo of the skull model and play with the effects in Photoshop Elements to see what I could come up with. This also helped me work out ideas for future pop art and graffiti inspired pieces. With each photo, I'll include the effects I used for it. Some of them look very similar, but I recommend that you click on the photos, to see larger photos. Then, you will see the differences.

The model
This is just cropped, resized and has my tag text.

I recolored the skull a light shade of red and made the back ground black, but I forgot to save that to show you all.


This is using the Half Tone effect.
I thought this was the most newprint/cartoon dot looking effect, so I started here.

Over the Half Tone, I used Watercolor.
I like how it definied the details with black.

I layered Poster Edge over the Watercolor, that is over the Half Tone.
This darkened the dark areas which made the dots look like a grid or mesh.

This is Half Tone, under Water Color, under Poster Edge, under Ocean Ripple
I like the obscured details. It's almost impressionist.

This is Half Tone under Color Half Tone.
This one is best viewed from far way, otherwise it might give you a headache and it's also hard to make out the details.

This is Half Tone under Mosaic
I like the pixelated look.

This is Half Tone under Water Color, under Sprayed Strokes.
If Jackson Pollock had made skulls, this might be one of his.

This is is Half Tone under Water Color, under Pointelize at setting 15.
This reminds me of Impressionist and stippling.

This is Half Tone under Water Color, under Stained Glass.
This is a different sort of pixelation.

These last 5 look very different from the ones above, but they were achieved by layering some other effects on tops of ones I layered in the above set. Again, it's interesting to see what happens with the effects are layered.


This is Half Tone, under Water Color, under Poster Edges, under Ocean Ripple, under Torn Edges.
This reminds me of sponge painting. Again, something I might revisit with paint on canvas.

This is Half Tone, under Note Paper.
It reminds me of an old etching plate from a news paper.

This is Hal Tone, under Water Color, under Conte Crayon with the Brick setting.
This is of course a nod to Graffiti art on brick walls.

This is Half Tone, under Water Color, under Photocopy.
This looks like a photocopy using bright paper and a lot of toner.

This is Half Tone, under Water Color, under Trace Contour.
It's almost like "Connect-the-Dots", but not.



In a separate entry, I'll post images of what happened when I changed the color of the skull. Very neat.

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