Well, jester things were going good, so I wondered what else I could do to mess with the black and white alternating colours. And I wanted to do a closeup of the eyes, with the dark and light irises. And I thought of splitting the face in that kinda cubist front/side deal. So... this happened.
Poser 4, Photoshop 4
Jester texture and collar by
Marcabros.
Jester hat by lourdes. (available at
Renderosity free
stuff.)
Yeah, guess who. Same jester Michael, but with no mask. And his counterpart, Stephanie, mapped to take Michael Maps. I took my stark black and white texture, that I made to mix the gold material in Vue, and made an inverted version and had two opposite black & white patterns.
All I did was position the two figures; I didn't even pose them. Well, Stephanie's head is turned a little, and so is her eye.
I rendered from the front camera, to get a flat, isometric view.
I got to do a lot more painting than usual in this one,
and it was fun. (Probably because I did so well at it, for once!)
The first thing I did (for the second version, anyway) was take the
black and white texture, blow it up even more, and make a sorta
cracked-makeup-caked face bump map. I used some Texturizing filters,
craquelure or whatever it's called, and sandstone. I loaded that up
as the bump map for the SkinHead on my figures. Stephanie's black face
was being too black, so I turned the texture map down to about 85% and I
made the highlights brighter (about 2 steps darker than mid grey). That
got the texture to show up fairly decently.
Then Michael's face cracking was too uniform and squarish,
so I went about (on a new layer!) smudging and blurring and airbrushing the
broader planes of cheek, forehead, and chin. I also cloned some of
the cracking onto his neck (I didn't do a crackle bump for the body), and
also onto Stephanie's white eye area, which I had left un-bumped.
I also had to clone texture onto Stephanie's neck, and
edit her whole head to have a darker range, without losing the texture.
That took a little brightness/contrast (after I painted a mask to select
her head.)
The other major things I did were with the hats. In
Poser, I made the front of Stephanie's hat invisible, because it was clashing
with the front of Michael's hat, and his is the one I wanted to see. So
there was a bit of an empty spot on the front of the hat. I lassoed
a chunk of the front part of the white side bit, and maneuvered it into place.
Then I smeared it into the original, and blurred to smooth that
out.
Then the back of Stephanie's hat was sticking out much
further than the side of Michael's hat on the other side. I thought
if I could flip that bit, I could balance out the composition. Of course,
inverting the values didn't work, because I ended up with a white hat bit
that glowed on the underside. But some brightness/contrast, more smearing,
and airbrushing, and it matched its base. And I made the white
pompom black. I could've copied the black pompom that was in the original
render, but I erased it before I got to that part. D'oh!
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