Girl Through Window

I used iColorama to blend two images, one of which is a portrait of a girl that I painted in SketchesPro, and one of which is an abstract of a city scene that I created in iColorama. This blend gives the effect of a viewing a girl through a reflection in a window of a night city scene.

I upsized this Sktchy photo (from the Sktchy app) twice in BigPhoto and imported it into SketchesPro.

I painted her with the paint brushes, and drew in details with the pen and marker brushes. The large color washes were painted on a layer above the photo layer. The pen and marker brush details were painted on a layer above the Wash layer with a layer mode of Multiply, because it emphasized the details. I painted the green background using a big watercolor brush on the bottom layer, so that the background would not cover any of the girl.

I didn’t really trace the girl, I just used her to get the general shape of the figure and the placement of the facial features, then I turned off visibility for the photo layer and completed the painting and the drawing of the details.

These are my layers in SketchesPro. You’ll notice the top, detail, layer is in Multiply mode, and visibility is turned off for the photo layer.

I cropped and tweaked the color and contrast in iColorama using Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 at low opacity and Adjust/Levels with just a small nudge to the Min Input slider.

I blended the image with itself using Style/Tensor Preset 6 and experimented with the sliders. I used a brush mask to retain the eyes of the unblended image. Then I used Adjust/High Preset 1 at medium opacity to lighten the highlights.

Now I created another image to blend with this one. I used BigPhoto to upsize this photo of NYC that I found in the online New York Public Library digital archives.

I opened it in iColorama and inverted it using Adjust/Channels preset 6. I applied Style/Threshold, Style/Simplify and Effects/Pixels to create an abstract of the image.

I opened the abstract image in SketchesPro and painted over the window areas with yellow paint, using a marker brush.

Now in iColorama, I blended this painted abstract image over the image of the girl. I used one of the negative blending modes (Negative, Difference, Exclusion) and experimented with all the sliders, including the sliders under Set. I used a brush mask to preserve the face. I thought this blend gives the effect of a reflection in a window of a night city scene.

In iColorama, I used Effect/Glow to give a softer effect, and by experimenting with all the sliders I also darkened the background color. I cropped a bit from the left and right edges, and I used Preset/Border preset 3 with a high radius to darken the edges a bit.