Splatter on the paint

Opening the image

Select your own jpg image, and name this layer “Base Image”.

Body painting

Create a new layer (Shift Ctrl+N), name it “Body Paint”, and set the blend mode to “Multiply”. Select the brush tool, choose a soft rounded brush, choose a size, then use it to paint the face and left arm of the base image. After that, change the foreground colour to #fff200.

Now were ready to paint. Start with the face and neck. In this step, feel free to zoom in and zoom out and change the brush size according to your needs. The shortcut to zoom in is Ctrl+ and zoom out is Ctrl-. To change the brush size, use right bracket sign “]” to increase your brush size and the left   bracket sign “[“ to make decrease the size.

Prepare the portrait for tracing

Now, change the foreground colour to “#ec008c”,  then trace the left arm using the Pen Tool.

Press Ctrl+Enter, and the blinking dashed-lines (marching ants) will appear. From the menu bar, choose Select > Modify> Feather then choose 0.5 and click OK. (If you’re using CS3, click Ctrl+Alt+D to show feather option.)

Select the paint bucket tool (G), click on the selected  area and press Ctrl+D to deselect.

Adding the Paint Toss

Open the number nine paint toss from media militia (http:// mediamilitia.com/), then drag this onto your working document, use the magic wand and select the black colour. Press delete to remove the background.

Press Ctrl+D to deselect, (name this layer “Face Toss”) and position the orientation of the paint (Ctrl+T) like shown below.

Now we will blend this paint to match the colour othe face. First, select the eyedropper tool (I), thenclick the area of the face shown.

Face toss colour

Create a new layer (Shift+Ctrl+N), name it “Face Toss Colour”, check the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” and change the blending mode to “colour”.

Now while your still in the “face toss colour” layer, use the paint bucket tool (g) and click it into the artboard to recolour the paint toss so we can match it on the colour of the face.

To complete the blending of the paint to the face, go to the “Face Toss” layer, click the “add vector mask icon”, then change your foreground colour to “black”.

Using the soft brush tool (while the vector mask is selected), paint over the area you want to erase, to achieve a similar  result like the one shown (left).

Carry on painting

 Repeating the process in step 4, apply  “paint toss no.16” on the left arm.

Now use “paint toss no.7” for the clothes. We need to adjust the brightness of the paint to about -92 to blend in with the clothes (Image > Adjustment > Brightness/Contrast).

Add hair colour

Add some flat black paint toss to part  of the hair. I used “paint toss no.9”.

Go to Layer > Layer Style > Color Overlay, and choose  the colour “Black”.

Using vector mask or the Eraser tool, remove some of the  paint. I preferred using vector mask so I’m able to revert  to the original at any time.

Adding shape cutouts

To add some shape cut-outs, select all the layers,  duplicate them, then merge them into one. Using  the Custom Shape Tool, select the triangle shown.

Holding the Shift key, create a triangle – you can move your  triangle by using the “path selection tool” (A). Feel free to  position your triangle wherever you want.

Triangle

Press Ctrl+Enter , then Ctrl+J to duplicate, move it to the right, then press Ctrl+D to deselect.

More triangles

Create another triangle from the merged layer, using the previously explained steps and overlap it with the first triangle. To interlock the two triangles, hold down the Ctrl key and click the left triangle – a marching ant should appear – then go to Select > Modify > Expand then set it to 15 pixels. After completing this step, select the right triangle layer, and using the eraser tool, erase the part shown in the image.

Final touches

Using the same technique as outlined in Step 10, start on the right triangle, then vice versa.To finish things up, I just added some additional shapes using the same technique.