In a recent campaign to promote the creative retouching services that Ardis offers to photographers and art directors in South Florida, we showed how we can take a bland stock photo and create striking surrealistic compositions. You can see the pictures in our campaign (and their creation process) in our new retouching page, but in this tutorial we decided to let you into one more secret and show you step by step how we created the beautiful porcelain mask that you can see in the composition below.

Note: this is not a beginners’ tutorial, but a little more advanced. It assumes that you already know to work your way around Photoshop. This tutorial also teaches you a couple of techniques of digital painting, so it really helps if you’re equipped with a graphic tablet. However, you can still get great results using a mouse only.

The image above is what we’re going to achieve at the end of this tutorial (click on it to enlarge it). It is up to your imagination to incorporate it in your own fantasy world and create a story around it.

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