I’ve seen some amazing photo-manipulations and dark artwork in the online community lately and felt inspired to create a new piece for Photoshop Creative’s Web Challenge this month.

Inspiration

I designed “The Formless One”, to communicate a story, I wanted to show that not only do people hide who they are behind mask , but sometimes the lose their own identity to the mask they where; so much so that the mask becomes their only true form, and stripped of that identity they are insubstantial beings.

This image is a bit darker that what I’ve worked on recently but I’m actually getting very much back into “dark artwork” and surreal imagery. The online art community has produced some amazing and inspiring artwork that has reinvigorated me to this end, especially the work featured in my “20 Top Tier Photo-manipulations” post.

Techniques
There was a lot of brush work involved in designing this image, and ironically quite a bit of masking! There was also a bit of retouch work to the model that shouldn’t be overlooked, I really wanted to make the eyes pop as they would become the focal point of the image as a whole. I spent a lot of time transitioning between brushes and various settings to give it the textured look it has.