If you haven’t seen the movie, definitely see it.  Totally worth or it.

With Avatar still on my mind, I came across this video:

The following is my rendition of this tutorial–done on myself.  Most of the steps done are just copied from watching the video (many times, and in slow motion ;)).  Thanks Peter Ammentorp Lund.

Step 1: take a cool picture.

This was taken from a tripod, with 3 strobes–bounced off wall behind for fill, one from the side to create some drama (yeah, drama), and then one from behind and above me for some hair sparkle…blahblah.  Anyways, the lighting isn’t the point, so I’ll continue.  ;)

Step 2: edit some blemishes.

Here I just edited blemishes and took out the stenciled border that goes around the top of my room (top of the frame)–just because it annoyed me, not that it would be in the final crop anyway.

Normally I try not to edit any facial blemishes on the premises that I want to convey reality in my photography, and the best way to do that does not involve cloning. I don’t really have a problem with editing blemishes, and if someone is just having a bad day in this department, then I’ll fix ‘em up, but this isn’t part of my normalities (although making up words is).

However, for this picture, all the bets are off.  I am trying to create Jon Avatar Yoder, and right now, reality is something that I have no care in the world for…edit away!

Step 3: color it up!

Here I just added a few layers of color, and adjusted them to my liking…to look more Avatar-esque.

Step 4: tighten and black out.

I didn’t really want the rest of the frame, so I just painted in black all around.  I also made the picture more narrow, since I have a big head, and I just thought that I could look more like an Avatar-creature with a skinnier head.  It’s kinda hard to notice, but in this picture I also have some more retouching that wasn’t included in step 3 (such as, my lip was doing something weird, so I straightened it).  Oops.

Step 5: crop, texture.

Cropped it to the head, grabbed a leather texture from emtilt-resource on deviantart, the same one used in the video (yep, super original), and then copied/cloned/flipped it until I got the desired result.

Step 6: the eyes!

Here I added some crazy cool eyes from here.  Also removed some of my eyebrow on the right so that it wasn’t sticking out of the avatar image I got.

Step 7: rough up the face.

Here I added some black brush around the face, plus a few highlights, to add some ridges (aka roughness) for epicness.

I also lightened up the face a bit more.

Step 8: sparkles!

Now as a final touch, I added lots of white dots, mirrored them into darker white dots, a couple black dots, then made them glow.

I really like how it turned out.  :-)

Some full-size images (click for large):

First bearded avatar. :)

PTP colors. :)

~ Jon