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I love to use warp to completely transform the shape and expression of faces. This image relies on warping for the huge eyes and anguished expression that draw you in. For added interest, I blended in a variety of textures that I produced in Metabrush, and I also introduce some wacky color that, among other things, gives her red-rimmed eyes that increases her anguished look. She appears to be pulled into a whirlwind of garish color. "Holes" that appear on parts of her face and body lend a hint of disease or corruption. The process I document here is typical of many images that use either Metabrush or iColorama's brush painting, in that there are very many blend steps that yield a complex and nuanced result. So this description is not so much a formula as a process.
I started with this photo from the Sktchy app. This was a very small file, so I upsized it twice in the BigPhoto app. I like her upward, apprehensive-seeming gaze.
I want to enlarge her head and eyes to make them the focal point of the image. In iColorama, I used Form/Deforms preset 5 to enlarge her head. I again used Form/Deforms preset 5 separately for each eye, to enlarge it. In Form/Deforms preset 5, you have to make careful use of all the sliders to control the effect, and use the x and y sliders to position the effect where you want it, in this case over each eye.
I used Form/Warp to further warp her, widening her cheeks.
I used Form/Deforms preset 5 to enlarge her mouth.
Now I opened the image in the Elasticam app. I find it easier to do smaller warp movements in Elasticam. Here I altered her expression by further enlarging the eyes, pulling up the outer corners of the eyes, changing the shape of the face, and redesigning the mouth.
Now I opened the image in iColorama. I used Adjust/Tonelab 4 at medium opacity for better tonal separation, which is what clarity is.
Using Brush/Paint and a small soft round brush with white paint, I painted in catchlights in her eyes. Then I used Effect/Denoise smooth preset at full opacity and then Style/Flow preset 5 at full opacity to smooth not only the catchlights, but the entire image, which had a lot of compression artifacts and noise, which had been amplified by the warping and deforming.
In Brush/Paint, I painted in black pupils with a small hard round brush and black paint. Then, using an inverted brush mask, I used Style/Flow preset 4 at full opacity, followed by Effect/Blur preset 5 at medium radius, to smooth them.
Now, because the image is quite soft as a result of all the smoothing, I used Effect/Raise preset 2 to give some emphasis to the edges. Call this Image A.
This is a slightly different version in which I used Effect/Raise preset 3 instead of preset 2 as I did above. This gives a much more pronounced effect. In Effect/Raise preset 3, it is important to experiment with all the sliders, including opacity. I saved this image for blending in a later step. Call this Image B.
Now returning to Image A, I opened Image A in the Metabrush app. On a new layer, I used the Shatter painting mode with the Wood 14 brush. Call this Image C. I saved this image for later use, and I turned off visibility for the layer by clicking on the layer's "eye" in the layer palette. The "eye" should now have a diagonal line through it.
Still in Metabrush, on a new layer, I used painting mode Artist 1 with Scribble brush 5. I used a large opaque brush. In the brush settings I put structure and shadow to zero, and I put rotation variance and position variance to their maximum settings. I saved this image, and I turned off visibility for the layer by clicking on the layer's "eye" in the layer palette. The "eye" should now have a diagonal line through it.
Still in Metabrush, on a new layer, I used painting mode 1color with a Lichen brush. I saved this image.
Now in iColorama, using Effect/Blend, I blended the above two Metabrush images in Normal mode, experimenting with opacity. Then I applied Adjust/Tonelab preset 4, which helps to separate the tones, often resulting in some color changes like it did here.
Again using Effect/Blend, I blended Image C on top of the above image in Normal mode, experimenting with opacity.
I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 for clarity, and I used Effect/Raise for emphasis.
Now I blended the previously saved Image B onto the above image, experimenting with opacity.
To smooth the roughness introduced as a result of these blending steps, I applied Style/Coherence and Effect/Denoise smooth preset. I lightened the eyes using Adjust/Exposure and an inverted brush mask to confine the effect to only the eyes. I removed the brush mask. Then I colored the upper part of the eyes using Tone/Enhance and an inverted brush mask. Then I removed the mask. To make the side lighting of the face more dramatic, I used Adjust/High preset 1. For a slight edge affect, I applied Style/Lighten preset 3 at low opacity.
Now I opened the image in Metabrush. I painted using the Paint mode with a low opacity large square brush. In the brush settings, I put structure and shadow to zero, and I put rotation variance and position variance to their maximum settings. As brush image, I used a metal texture from iColorama that I saved onto a blank white canvas.
Now I opened the above image in iColorama. Using Effect/Blend, I blended Image A on top of the above image. I used one of the negative blend modes (Difference, Negation, Exclusion). I experimented with the Opacity and Feature sliders, and the Lightness and Gray sliders under Set. Use of the Gray slider allowed me to control which portions of the top image are blended, which in this case confined the revealing of the metallic texture to only the deepest shadows of the girl's body and face. These little areas with "holes" will lend the final image a faint feeling of disease or corruption.
I used Adjust/Rgbcurves to introduce some extreme and varied color. You can drag around points separately on the tone curve and on each of the red, green and blue curves to get often wacky results like this. It takes quite a bit of playing around to get something usable.
Now using Effect/Blend, I blended Image A onto the above image. The blend I created gives her red-rimmed for an anguished look. She appears to be pulled into a whirlwind of garish color. I lightened eyes using Adjust/Exposure and an inverted brush mask.
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