Good or Evil?

Before I started this piece, I knew I wanted contrast between 'good and evil'. I tried to represent this by digitally altering a photo of myself. The soul is supposedly seen through the eyes of a person and this was the basis of my creation. Two sides of the same person, one good, one bad and both from the same soul. Duplicity at its most basic.

This piece started as a self-portrait taken using a Sony digital camera with flash (which hurt a little so close to my eyes). I had a concept in mind when I started editing the photo. I worked on the red eye first. It took several attempts to get the eye exactly the shade of red I wanted. At first, I had it a lot brighter, but I wanted it to look deader - not like the terminator.

The red eye was achieved simply by using a rounded brush in Photoshop and using various shadow, glow and satin layer styles.

The best part for me was creating the bruising. For this technique I used several different "natural' brushes and spent a good hour building up the colour and shape of the bruise. It has been 'smudged' quite a bit, maybe a tad bit too much - but it was my first attempt. I actually used a lot of greens and blues for the bruising and then inverted the colours to get the dead, corpse look.

To make my skin look dead I created a new layer and filled with a solid colour - then changed the opacity and lighting settings. I added in some extra shadows around the nose and face using various brushes. The blood coming out from the eye was created using a blood brush and I played around with different layer settings and colours to get the consistency looking like it was actually bleeding from my eye. I also had to make it look as if it was bleeding down my face, not just out of my eye and this was achieved by editing the shape of the blood.

For the good eye, all I did was use another standard round brush, keeping the natural colour of my eyes I chose a lighter shade of blue and covered the eye with the brush, adjusting the layer settings until it was really light and shining, divine like.

Unfortunately my skin isn't as luminous in real life and I had to use the brightening tool and go with the natural contours of my skin to it look like I was bathed in a golden light. The hair was especially hard to do, as every time I lightened it, it would look like straw. Hair is something I still need to practice doing - but I'm happy with this one as I got the colour how I wanted.

I added some finishing touches by whitening the eye on the left hand side and added 'sparkles' around the eye to give it a magical look.