Keeper of Dolls Portrait: Step by Step

I have never really written a post that gave insight about my photoshop process. I'm a big photoshop lover, all the way. I love photography but one of the things that truly made me fall in love with the possibilities that photography delivers is the fact that I can play with the photos in photoshop. So many images I have done in the past wouldn't have been possible without photoshop, for me at least. I thought it would be neat and a good way to kick off my new blog with a post that explained how I made my latest portrait.

For every portrait I do, I always shoot at least 100 images, if not more. In different outfits, space, positions, etc. If I learned anything from my 365 project, it was to shoot as many images as possible because often I'll get inspired by a specific image I shot and end up taking a completely different route. I really love that type of creative process because I end up exploring something new that I didn't originally have planned in my head. It feels really exciting. Honestly though, most of my portraits come from faint images in my head that is constantly changing as I work through the images after shooting. It's pretty rare when I have a very specific image in my head, usually it's more of a concept but the little details are ever-changing.

I shot about 100 images in natural light. I usually don't really use flash very much unless I feel that it's way too dark and I wouldn't be able to fix the light in photoshop well enough. I tried two outfits as I couldn't really decide which one I wanted. In my head I saw an isolated lady with dolls in her hair. I wanted the feel to be kind of haunting. I also just really wanted to play with my hair because it's finally long enough to do this sort of thing... and I was dying to do something with all the dolls I have collected over time. If you're a friend of mine, you know me and my love of creepy dolls. I used to have them displayed in my rooms, creeping my guests out. Now I live with my lover so I have to "compromise" by only displaying one or two, not all of them. Most of them are now in a box (which I sometime feel guilty about). So it's always a pleasure to take them out of the  box and using them for various reasons. In this case, I wrapped them all up in my hair and used a whole hella lot of hairspray and bobby pins to keep it together. After shooting for a little bit, I then looked at all the images on my computer and selected several images that I wanted to study more in photoshop.

 

After some studying, I selected a base image to work with, and saved some other images of the dolls in different angles so I could add them to my hair as I made my hair longer.

 

I began working on adding bits of other images of the dolls into the base image and deciding on what kind of shape I wanted my hair to be. This involves a lot of layering, rotating, re-sizing, etc. I decided I wanted the final image to have a square crop so I added some empty space above to eventually fill in.

 

After I felt pretty satisfied with the overall shape of the hair and all the dolls. I then started to fill in the missing pieces by cloning and airbrushing.

 

I knew from the beginning that I wanted the portrait to seem elegant but also slightly off and creepy. I felt that my neck looked way too short in this image so I decided to make it longer. Which felt a little bit challenging to me as I didn't have very much experience with stretching limbs and having it still look realistic. So this was a fun experiment for me! I also airbrushed away my cold sores on my lip. Only if I could do that in real life...

 

I obviously needed to work on the neck some more but took a break to smooth out the background/fill the empty space. I then twiddled around with the curves, colours, etc in photoshop before returning to the neck to do some more work. I also added some more doll parts.

 

I felt that there were perhaps too much space around the lady so I cropped in a little bit. Looking back now though I'm not completely sure if I made the right decision or not. It's interesting to look back on portraits and question what we were thinking during the process. Some of my 365 portraits, I find myself looking at them and going, I would've done it this way instead or why is this not brighter? Etc. I suppose over time our tastes change and also time constraints really plays into the picture for sure, there were times with the 365 project where I just wanted to finish the portrait so I could get out and do something else. Finally I worked on the colours some more to make it look the way I wanted it to look and did some final minor touches.

 

I felt that the background and my dress blended in too much so I replaced the background with something more textured. Tada, completed!