North Star Genesis

ok so recently I felt a little creative and thought this would make a great opportunity to show you how relatively easy it is, to create something more interesting using a little bit of digital magic.. (Larger final image preview at the end of this article) The inspiration for this being from a story idea I had, where eventually she arrives to earth via a massive cloaked ship of Kandor and thus emerging from the city much older in appearance…

Step 1 – Choosing the Subject Matter

For this exercise i chose Kristanna Loken, which some of you may remember as the TX from Terminator 3 fame. Personally i always thought she would be just perfect as an older version Supergirl.

Step 2 – Removing Excess Material

Although there are many elegant ways to cut out images depending on the program you’re using but for this part, I just used a combination of channel mask mapping and a little free hand selection when it was required. Then it was just a simple matter of placing her onto a nice space background.

Step 3 – Creating a Base Costume

Ok most people just paint by hand over the top of a separate copy layer. However I figured for speed, it was just as easy to color grade the whole layer to the color of my choosing. In this case a kind of Iridium Blue tone for the costume. Then it was just a simple matter of roughly painting over the areas of her original clothing that I didn’t need.

Step 4 – Adding Costume Accessories

This part just involved roughly painting in parts of the cape and belt onto separate layers once again. For easy positioning but not only that, it’s just good practice to create new layers when adding new elements. Especially if you make a mistake, its much easier to remove that layer section without ruining the rest of what you have created thus far.

Step 5 – Adding  More Features

Here I just added a new layer of the face cut out of the original layer in step 1. So that I could overlay her image over the top of the cape and newly added S shield logo.

Step 6 – Adding Additional Tonality

This part just involves painting in more shaded areas to simulate the direction of the light shining on her face. It also makes the suit look more believable and less painted on. Again this step is also done on separate layers for each area of the costume to avoid mistakes, you can of course merge all shaded areas once your happy with the results.

Step 7 – Adding Background Material

So by now if you have done it right, you will have a whole bunch of separate layers to create your masterpiece thus far. However we still need to add some images into the background to make our picture look more complete. Here I added a city scene and planet earth into the backdrop and using the city scene, I just changed its layer mode to Hard Light so that I could use a faded edge eraser to blend the city into the space background. Then using another color grade layer and setting its mode to Burn, so that i could better match my model into the added scenery. You may also need to play around with light and contrast as I have done here to make it work.

Step 8 – Adding Titles and Overlays

Now the final stage is probably the most easiest but is still no less easier to stuff up, so again making sure you add new layer when adding your overlay effects such as titles, color grades or even electro energy as I have done here. This stage is of course not always necessary but for this image, I felt it needed a more complete look to properly sell her as being part of the image. (Click image below to see a larger view)

Ok so obviously there are some things I’m not quite happy with in this image but, it at least gives you a good idea of the kind of process involved when creating digital works such as these.  However this is just like anything else! Quality takes real-time and practice.

All Artwork remain the properties of NSG Productions.
For Personal Use Only, No Copying, Editing Or Redistribution of Images.
Copyright © North Star Genesis