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the subtle art of decapitation
As Christmas is coming and we all start thinking about those seemingly endless Christmas parties with their accompanyingly monotonous guests, I thought this might be the perfect time to do a tutorial about decapitation and dismemberment. At what other time of year do we think more about cutting Granny’s head off, or dream of sticking any kind of long, pointy object up Santa’s self-satisfied fat arse than at Yuletide? Step 1 Ok, here we go. Get your digital camera out. If you don’t have one, ask your mother for one for Christmas. Just don’t mention my name, alright? If you have a tripod: Bastard! If you don’t, get a chair and stick a thin book under the back half of your camera, so it’s leaning towards the floor. Don’t use say, War and Peace, or the Bible, as knowing your luck the camera is likely to fall on the floor and smash into a thousand pieces.
Step 2 That done, use the timer mode on the camera and quickly jump into the scene. Make sure your neck is well exposed and you’re in the centre(ish).
Step 3 Go back to the first image and taking the Polygonal tool, make a selection more or less where the head should be. That done hit CRTL+C to copy:
Step 4 Go back to the other image and CRTL+V to paste the selection. Hit V to activate the move tool, and move the selection so it covers exactly the same area.
Step 5 Ok, now for the cool part. Make sure the new layer is selected in the layers panel then click on the ‘Add Vector Mask’ icon. Now we are going to use the brush tool to take away the unwanted parts of this new layer. Remember: black takes the layer away, and white brings it back. Also, don’t forget to use the soft and hard brushes to vary the mask effect.
If you really want to get amazing results when using Photoshop, I would highly recomend you to buy a Wacom digital tablet
Step 6 Now we have to make the neck more 3 dimensional. Zoom in (Z), create a new layer and select the pen tool. If you don’t know how to use the pen tool go look it up on the net, because I’ll be buggered if I can be bothered to explain all that now. Click with the pen tool around the neck like this the image below. If you are really interested in Photoshop I highly recommend you buy a Wacom digital tablet. Amazingly cool things.
Step 7 Right, Click on the Paths panel and you’ll see our path. CRTL+Click it to turn it into a selection, then SHIFT+F5 to bring up the Fill screen and choose ‘50% grey from the menu.
Step 8 Bugger! The neck’s gone. Well, just use another layer mask:
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. They make life much easier and you can achieve a level of accuracy that is impossible with a mouse.
