Making a Statue in Photoshop

In this tutorial we are producing a statue, using a picture of a woman, a marble texture, and Photoshop with its layers options.

1. First of all we have to find a suitable photo. The essential criteria for it would be no floating hair, especially on the face, and open neck. Too much make-up is also not very good for the task. I found a photo of a woman with smooth hair put upwords.

2. Now we have to prepare the photo. After creating a layer copy of the image put it into grey-scale mode as we need only the details of the face, not the colors. After the color information is dicarded put it back into rgb. Or you can use Color/Saturation window to make the image black and white.

3. On the black and white layer copy (the origianl can be made invisible by now, we won't do anything with it) select the woman figure and delete the remaining background. In this image selection I also removed the detail I thought unnecessary - erased the earings.

3. Now we open the file with the texture and drag the texture image to the picture of the woman. It becomes a separate layer there. Make sure it is on top. Use the selection from the face layer to remove the texture not covering the woman.

4. Set layer blending mode to Multiply. The texture in this example is very light, the face of the woman made it barely visible and we need to reduce the opacity of the woman face layer. With darker textures you may need to reduce the opacity of the texture layer.

5. Now is the time to work with detail. The lips and brows are too dark for the stone statue. Use dodge tool on them with medium exposure and opacity settings. I also removed the lip gloss with the Healing brush. And blured the hair a little. Some dodging can also be applied there.

6. The trickiest part of this tutorial is making the stone eyes for the statue. Staying in the face layer make a selection around the eyes. Make sure you are creating a good conture, taking in the eyelashes and making both eyes to have the more or less the same form. I used poligonal lasso for the selecion pressing shift for selecting the second eye after the first.

7. Within the selection use Clone Stamp with the target spot taken from the stone layer. The eyes will be stony now.

8. Now we have to make these stony eyes to look more natural - to add some volume by adding shadows.

9. With the selection still active draw a black to transparent gradient starting on the same level with upper point of the selection and finishing in the first third of the eyes. If the gradient made too sharp a shadow reduce its opacity. Then use the Burn tool along the conture of the eyes with reasonable exposure and opacity settings.

10. Remove selection by pressing Ctrl+D and use Blur tool on the contures of the eyes to blend them with the face.

11. Now is the time to find new background for the statue. I put a black and white brick wall behind it.

12. To make the statue not to look too flat we add a Drop Shadow layer style to the top layer.