Mock Development

The idea

My idea in its most simplest form is to recreate a person with words, 

so firstly I organised a photo shoot. I focused on getting good portrait photos. It was important to me that the models were young because this would later help with the imagery of the youths being the future of the planet 

Out of the photos I took two of them stood out to me as really good

 Now that the images that I want to use have been established the editing process can being.

Starting with standard image adjustments like cropping and making sure the levels look good.

After that I needed to define the light boundaries (separating what is light and what is dark)

I was able to do this by using the "colour range" tool and selecting the mid tones of the image and filling  it with a medium grey colour and the same with the shadows filling with a pure black

Shown here

Now it gets complicated, I had to create a vector mask of my black and white layer, then creating a new separate document I created a "word brush" of sorts, 

With this brush I simply painted over the mask to create the effect you can see above, some parts where hard to see. To fix this using a soft brush, painted over parts like eyes and hair to make them bolder.
I also created a separate brush with a small phase "do you ever stop and think?" written on it and added it into areas that looked particularly sparse, not only did it help fill out the image but it also helped with the theme of this piece (that being the future)

Now all that is left to do is to create a gradient overlay. I simply went into the blending options and created new gradient of colours that I personally think are aesthetically pleasing