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Intro:

Today’s tutorial will be slightly shorter than most that I write, but I feel that it shows some really useful techniques that are worth learning.

Final Image

This is the final image that we are going to be created:

Step 1:

Create a new document and paste in a photo of a woman’s face. Make sure that it’s roughly centrally aligned.

Step 2:

Now grab an image of an ink splatter and paste it into your document. Drag the image so that the main part of the splatter goes over the woman’s eye. It’s very important that your splatter is black on a white background, and that the contrast is set to +100.

Now we want to cut out the ink splatter from it’s background. This would be impossible using the lasso or magic wand selection tools, so I go to select > color range and then choose ’shadows’ and make sure that ’selection’ is checked. Photoshop then automatically selects the black parts of my image – in this case the paint splatter. It’s very important to hide the layer containing the photo of the woman, as the color range selection will pick up the dark parts of this image despite it being on a different layer. Also, be sure to check ‘invert’ so that the selected area is your white background and not the ink splatter, this way you can simply hit delete and delete the area around the splatter.

Step 3:

Then duplicate your ink splatter layer and go to edit > transform > flip horizontal. Move the flipped image so that it covers the woman’s other eye.

Step 4:

Now find other images of ink splatters and position them over the nose/mouth and between the eyes. When you’ve done this merge all of your ink splatter layers together and then using the color range technique select the area around them. Then go to select > save selection and save it as ’splatter’.

Step 5:

Hide your ink splatter layer and select the layer with the photo of the woman. Load your ’splatter’ selection then hit delete achieve the outcome below:

Step 6:

Now create a new layer called ‘watercolor’ and select a set of watercolor brushes set at black, 100% opacity. Paint over your photo until it’s covered:

Step 7:

Then increase the contrast by 100 and set the layer’s blending mode to overlay, and opacity to 50%. Load your ’splatter’ selection and hit delete to delete the parts of the watercolor brushes going past your photo of the woman.

Step 8:

Now go back to your ink splatter layer which has been hidden. Make it visible again and move it below your photo layer and watercolor overlay layer. Then go to edit > transform > rotate and rotate it round like this:

Step 9:

Now go to layer blending options and apply a color overlay effect of the color AEDF43.

Step 10:

Now duplicate your layer and go to edit > transform > rotate 180 degrees. Change your color overlay color to B75CBD.

And we’re done!

To finish up add a paper texture as a background and paste in a photo of a paintbrush to complete the arty look.

I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial, and as always I’d love to hear what you think!