Force of Nature is a fairly simple image to create but uses several techniques in combination to accomplish something clean and visually dynamic.

Final Image

Force of Nature by Roberto Blake

Stock Photography

Dancer

http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-6310456-the-dancer.php

Cracked Texture

http://freestocktextures.com/texture/id/570

Skills Required:
Selection/Masking
Blending/Layer Effects
Dodge and Burn

STEP 1 Complex Selection.
To assuming you don’t have the new refine tools of the latest Photoshop (CS5) to help you, you’ll need to use the Select>Color Range option in the menu to help you make accurately select and mask things like hair on this model.Before you start, be sure to duplicate you original layer as you will still need it. I labeled mine “BASE”.

Once you’ve done that you can easily select and mask the rest of the model using the Pen Tool or the Quick Select tool.

STEP 2 Creating the Ghost Effect.

Once you’ve created your mask on the “BASE” layer create 2 more duplicate layers, named “GHOST” and “DODGE N BURN”. Be sure that the “DODGE N BURN” layer sits directly above the “GHOST” layer. For now toggle the “DODGE N BURN” layer to invisible.

Convert your “GHOST” layer to black and white with whatever settings look good to you. Change the Blend Mode to Hard Light. Shift the image up and away slightly from the model to create the ghost effect (I went up and to the left). Next Click on your Right Click on your Layer Mask, and Apply Layer Mask. Next create a new layer mask and using a black and white Gradient Tool apply a directional fade away effect to your ghost. Covert the layer to a Smart Object.

Now you will see why we converted to a Smart Object. Goto Filter>Blur>Motion Blur and apply what settings look good to you, don’t worry because you are using a Smart Filter on a Smart Object, you can change them if you like.

STEP 3 Dodge and Burn

Toggle your “DODGE N BURN” layer back to being visible, It should still be in place over your “BASE” layer. Using the Dodge and Burn tools, enchance you image and give it some depth.

STEP 4 Cracked Floor

Get a cracked floor texture, several of them are avaialbe for free or come in sets. If it is not already black and white convert it now. Change the Blend Mode to Overlay and about 60%. Now create a Guide where the floor begins and move your cracked floor into place and the create the proper perspective by using the distort tool.

STEP 5 Simple Flares

By now most of you have various techniques for creating flares, in this image I used one that was very simple. On a new layer I used a soft Brush at about 50% Opactity and then when back over it with a larger brush then added and outer glow effect.

STEP 6 More effects and finshing

You’ve completed the basic image at this point but if you want you can add other effects as I have such as the light streaks or the grunge splashes from the jeans. I personally also added some more Doge and Burn to the original layer’s background to create more contrast.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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OASIS is something I came up with while looking at an old piece of work “Star Girl I”. I realized since working on that image that my skills have progressed a great deal and wanted to see what I could do with that stock image today, and that is how I made my start on this project.

OASIS Moonchild by Roberto Blake

Photo Manipulation and effects are the area of graphic design that I enjoy the most. I love taking images and bringing them together in new and interesting ways to make something wholly different. For this I wanted to creating something stunning and dramatic that had an organic feel to it. I also still wanted to use lighting effects in this image, but something more than typical streaks and swirls.

The end result was something beautiful that I feel is also unique.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Raven Dawn II

Raven Dawn II is a follow up to my original Raven Dawn image using what I’ve learned since that time. For this image I took a simple and clean stylish approach.

I posted this image a while back both on my Deviantart.com account and on my homepage, but I wanted to actually talk about the image itself a bit as it is also one of my most popular images online. Having seen this stock photo be used countless times I want to do something interesting and unique with it myself. At the same time I wanted to do something clean and stylish while at the same time with dark undercurrents. I wanted this image to scream subtlety, utilize eye direction, good usage of space, texture and wanted it to evoke emotion and stimulate, and I fee that in its simplicity that it accomplishes all those things very well.

Time: 7 Hours
Tools: Photoshop, Wacom Intuos 3 4×6

Model: http://katanaz-stock.deviantart.com/

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Celestial Being is one of my favorite pieces. I wanted to create something both angelic and alien in nature. This had various concepts applied to it each holding different meanings, particularly the lotus. Those following eastern culture/philosophy will pick up very different things from those adhering to a more western/traditional view.

Roberto Blake Photo Manipulation Celestial Being

Most of the work for this was done in photoshop where as the vectors were done in illustrator and brought into photoshop with effects applied to them after the fact.

This is one my images that were featured in Advanced Photoshop Magazine issue 67.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Today’s featured artist has some truly amazing work, particularly some prints available through deviantart.com. Alexiuss is an amazing digital artist based out of Canada with a fantastic array of dark artwork. In fact I have to honestly say this represents some of the best dark artwork I’ve seen in the deviantart community.

You can view this artist complete gallery at Deviantart: http://alexiuss.deviantart.com/

Neurotic Indisposition by Alexiuss

Feral Nova by Alexiuss

Death by Stress by Alexiuss

Antoymic Cyclone by Alexiuss

Insidious Discrepancy by Alexiuss

Absense of Vision by Alexiuss

Machinery of the Stars by Alexiusss

Antecedet Terminus by Alexiuss

Fate by Alexiuss

Praetorian by Alexiuss

Gabriel by Alexiuss

Chronoscape Thundersnow by Alexiuss

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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I had meant to post this sooner, but as some of you may already know I ad the pleasure of having some of my work featured in Photoshop Creative Magazine Issue 54 as part of a spread encouraging creatives to post their work to the Photoshop Creative Gallery. I’ve been an avid reader of Photoshop Creative for quite sometime so it was a real treat and honor to be featured in their magazine. Interestingly on the page next to the one I was featured on Alena Lazareva who I had the pleasure of interviewing a few months early was also featured!

photoshop-creative-feature-issue54

Aside from the sense of pride and accomplishment in seeing my work printed in one of my favorite publications it also made me take myself a lot more seriously. As creatives we all try to keep in mind that others are viewing our work, our development and our growth, but once your work reaches a such a broad audience it really bring this home for you.

I received a lot of positive response from this and some new interest from this feature, and it has definitely been encouraging. I would say to any other digital artist reading this to always keep striving to achieve goals and produce the best work that you can, and submit to as many venues as possible, you never know how these things will turn out or where they will lead.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Its been a while since I’ve done a featured artist from deviant art, I apologize because its long over due, and the new year has given me a new schedule as well as many new projects to handle. but fear not, the days of slack are now behind us!  Today’s artist that I’ve feature has some work that simply blew me away when I saw it. Her work managed to find its way into my favorites collection fairly quickly. She is 27 year old Turkish Graphic Designer Asli Yeniay Kizilay, and her work is just amazing.

Angelica by Wiksa

Angel's Hell by Wiksa

Scream of Hope by Wiksa

Lament by Wiksa

Misanthrope by Wiksa

Fabels Tragedy by Wiksa

Sear Me by Wiksa

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Binary Angel is one of my newest photo-manipulations, though it differs from most in the fact that I decided to combine a large number of  vector graphics in this piece. The vector wings were from Go Arsenal Media, a great resources for brushes vector graphics and templates at a reasonable price. The model is from istockphoto and the remaining elements are custom.

Inspiration

Ultimately I came up with this while trying to decide on what to do about creating my custom 404 page (still a work in progress).  I wanted something unique and different that also still demonstrated graphic design. This approach was heavily influenced by the fact I was watching the last few episodes of an Anime called “Outlaw Star” in which the characters entered the “Digital Plane” and were interacting with a “Machine Diety”. The idea of angelic presence administrating over cyberspace intrigued me and prompted me to create this image.

The Design Process

The choices in the elements and colors was fairly simple after I picked the stock image. I knew that I wanted her to be an angel and I wanted to create an interesting but “uncluttered” cyberspace environment for her. I had already had the wings for quite sometime, and incorporated them first to set the tone of the image and figure out the spacing.

After that I had to decide on the illuminated screens. At first I had thought to use website screen shots (most likely from my own site) but I decided against that as I wasn’t sure how well it was coming across, so I decided to use blank screens with lighting effects. One of the hardest things was planning the angles for this and creating just the right perspective. Next I created a custom pixel brush by defining a square as a brush and adjusting the custom brush settings for it.

When I created the light spirals around her lower body I had another chance to look at the image and remember that she was an angel and it occurred to me…”When is the last time I saw an angel with a halo?” So I decided to add one in a light blue, in a shade very close to the one I used for the screens earlier.

I have to say that I’m very happy with the way this image came out and that I think it will be one of the stronger pieces in my portfolio.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Keeping the Faith is one of my newer photo manipulation projects and a chance to show off some refinement to my techniques. In some ways its is similar to my much earlier work “Cloud Chaser”.

Inspiration- Keeping the Faith was inspired in combination by both my own work Cloud Chaser, and just the amazing series of work that I’ve seen and showcased in the online community. Seeing all that amazing work drove me to want to create something more, something visually stunning, as a result Ive been creating more work and trying to take my art to a higher level. I would encourage other artist to gather inspiration from the work of people they admire since its something that has been working very well for me.

The actual choice in model was fairly easy since she had a similar pose to the model I used in Cloud Chaser. I also really liked the coloring of her outfit and the way those colors played off each other, I tried to emulate that in the effects that I used in the image since they blended very well together. As to the title of this image I’m trying to reattach myself to the belief that the impossible can be achieved by sheer will.

Effects- I used a combination of effects many of you have  probably seen me resort to before, although more effectively this time. I used dynamic lighting, disintegration, and smoke effects in this image. I also wanted to use high contrast colors to really make the image pop.

In this image I used streaks of light, light particles and energy spheres to create a surreal, fun and expressive image. As for the disintegration effect, I wanted to make the model a part of the ether in a visually interesting way.

Typography- For the typography in this piece I used a font called “MOD”. I decided to make the font transparent using the multiply blend mode. I felt the type and the color streak helped visually balance the image and the white space in it.

Retouching- The retouch work on this image was very involved and I actually used several techniques from Rob Shields, to make the give the model more depth and a sharp detailed look. I believe it worked out very well. I believe that this is an image that will set the tone for the level of work I’ll be putting out going into the year 2010.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Energetic was a photo manipulation inspired by the song “Energetic” by BOA. It is a high impact club song with a great beat and energy to it and was able to inspired some of my best work. This image has also become one of my most popular photo manipulations on DeviantArt.

Roberto Blake- Photo Manipulation Energetic

Inspiration- As you know the title and inspiration for this photo manipulation was the song “Energetic” by BOA and international pop artist. Her music is newer here in the states but those of you familiar with JPop probably have heard her before.
This photo manipulation was a chance to do some more work with lighting effects. I particularly like working with lighting effects because they are able to convey high energy, motion,  and magic, and sometimes all at once.

In this image I tried to create the effect of the female model almost giving off a nuclear or atomic effect, and a level of energy that almost can’t be contained. I chose the colors based mostly on the model’s outfit but also because they would stand out against the light background well.

Effects- The lighting effects were done utilizing the pen tool in combination with the direct selection tool. By slightly adjusting the path made by the pen tool before creating a new stroke, I was able to make streaks of light with various brush widths at similar or intersecting angles.

I also put the strokes on different layers using different outer glow colors and settings. I made a custom particle brush for this, which I used on the different lighting effect layers. I purposely set them up to look like atomic particles.

Retouching- The retouch work was actually kind of extensive. In addition to the regular airbrush work I’ve been doing some new techniques I picked up from a Rob Shields tutorial to do better sharpening, adjusting levels, curves and other things to give the image a much crisper feel and more depth. The extraction of the model was done using the pen tool in combination with masking, which in most cases it the way I prefer to extract the models.

Print- I actually plan of featuring this image in my self published book coming out first quarter of next year, “ARTFUL MANIPULATIONS“, which will showcase the best digital artwork I’ve done over the past year. I most definitely believe that this is one of the best pieces I’ve done yet, and the response to this image in the online community has been great. If you can actually view a full size version of  Energetic on Deviantart and favorite it!

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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Now FREEZE is a photo-manipulation that is straight hip hop. I found a fantastic stock image to work with and using dynamic lighting effects was really able to bring it to life in a new way.

Inspiration
I drew some of my inspiration for this image from the lighting effects work of Adam Spizak. In this work I combined various elements like flares, smoke, glow effects lines and particles, I really feel that the combination of effects served the image well. This image is featured as a spread in the printed version of my 2009 portfolio.

Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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