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I love this beautiful porcelain teapot. I had the idea to try to animate it. The way I did it was to first blend a face onto it to suggest it's alive. Then distorted the shape of the teapot as if it was twisting, and blended that with the undistorted version, to give an impression of movement. Finally, I added additional texture that further adds to the feeling of motion.
I started with this photo from the Rijksmuseum website, which provides high-resolution images free to use and modify for any purpose, in their Rijksstudio.
In iColorama, using Form/Crop, I cropped off some of the dead space.
I'll use this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images. I like the shape of her face and her serious gaze. I'll use her face to blend into the teapot. But first I was to do some preprocessing to her.
In iColorama, I applied Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 at low opacity, for clarity and depth.
I want to get rid of her freckles. So I applied Effect/Denoise Smooth preset twice, and then applied a touch of Effect/Blur, masking out the eyes and some of the hair, to smooth out her skin and remove the freckles. The smoothness of her face will help a lot in making a good blend later.
I used Form/Glass preset 19, with the size slider set to max, to change the shape of the face. I tried all the sliders, including the rotation slider under Set. Thanks to Donald Bishop for this suggestion. I like to deform faces. In this case it changes the expression from ordinary to lively and inquisitive. And it increases the size of her eyes and mouth.
Now I applied Style/Flow at low opacity to smooth the entire image.
I painted the face on top of the Teapot, using Effect/Blend in Normal blending mode at low opacity, and I used an inverted brush mask to confine the effect to only the Teapot.
I used Adjust/Tonelab and Tone/Enhance to for color and tone.
I will use this Pixabay image of the sky for background.
In Effect/Blend, I blended the sky over the teapot at medium opacity, using a brush mask to keep the sky from covering the teapot. I positioned the sky image so that a dark part of that image appears to the lower right of the teapot, serving as the teapot's shadow.
I painted some steam coming out of the spout, using two different Humo brushes in Brush/Colorize.
I used Form/Glass preset 19 and experimented with all the sliders to get a distortion I liked. Then I reduced the opacity, which gives a doubling of the teapot, which adds to the impression of movement.
I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 and Tone/Enhance to modify tone and color.
Here is an image I made earlier (by blending a Pixabay woman with Rijksstudio flowers, then applying Style/ET-Flow and Tone), that I will use in the secondary image in Style/Tensor preset 5, next, to add more of a feeling of motion to the image.
For the final image, I applied Style/Tensor preset 5, using the above image as the secondary image. You can see the texture and distortion that it provides, further adding to the feeling of motion.
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