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One of my favorite themes is showing what lies beneath the face or beneath the skin. Using Metabrush, I wanted to paint using one of my favorite textures, which is a metallic texture with large punched holes in it, that I sometimes used in iColorama to blend into a face to give the illusion of a hollow face. Here I used that texture as source image for a brush in Metabrush. Painting with that brush at partial opacity, I was able to create the illusion of layers of surfaces beneath her skin. I liked it so much that I made two versions of the idea.
I started with this photo from Pixabay, which is a source of copyright-free images.
I plan to paint over the woman in Metabrush. This is the brush image I will use. It's an image that is based on a texture in Texture/Metal in iColorama. To save it, I opened a blank canvas in iColorama, applied this texture, and saved the file. Then I tinted it in Tone/Tint.
In Metabrush, I used a large round basic brush at partial opacity, using the Stamp painting mode, and with spacing all the way to the right in the brush settings.
This is how it looked in Metabrush. It's dark, but we will fix it.
I opened the Metabrushed image in iColorama. Here is how it looks after using various presets in Adjust/Tonelab and various Tone/Enhance. Here you can see how the use of a partial opacity brush in Metabrush allow you to look through the holes in the surface of her skin to other surfaces underneath, which is pretty cool!
I lightened the eyes. To do that, I used the exposure slider in Adjust/Exposure, and used an inverted brush mask to paint in the effect only in the eyes.
Here is an image from the Rijksmuseum website, which provides high-resolution images free to use and modify for any purpose, in their Rijksstudio. I plan to use this image to add interest to the background of my piece.
I added in the background texture using Effects/Blend, and I painted in a sloppy brush mask over the figure with a large brush, giving her a kind of halo. This is the final image.
I wanted to make another version, so I reopened my Metabrush work, which Metabrush saves with all the layers intact, and I changed the opacities of the layers to get this result.
Now I opened the above image in iColorama. I used a variety of Adjust/Tonelab presets and Tone/Enhance presets to get this.
I brightened the eyes. To do that, I used the exposure slider in Adjust/Exposure, and used an inverted brush mask to paint in the effect only in the eyes. Then I cropped a bit from the top of the image.
Now I want to clean up the background. Using Effect/Blend in iColorama, I blended it with the original Pixabay image, trying several blend modes and slider positions, especially the sliders under Set. The sliders under Set were what made the dirty background disappear, and what introduced the normal skin tones on the left side of the face and neck.
I used Tone/Enhance and Adjust/Levels, both at low opacity, to enhance the color and contrast.
For a finishing touch, I smoothed some of the edges of the blend by using Style/Flow with an inverted brush mask and a small brush, to paint in the correction just where it was needed.
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