Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
When I saw “Extraterrestrial” by Lizz Palen (above), I immediately emailed to ask her if she would share some tips for readers. I love the frenetic energy of her projects. Her entire stream is an exciting exploration of how to enhance Second Life photos with smoke and fire and imagination, but this one seemed particularly powerful. Luckily for us, she was happy to share her process.
After the cut, Lizz explains how she created Extraterrestrial and shares two videos of her editing other pictures.
For "Extraterrestial", she shot the photo of Nelly, her client, in the Firestorm viewer against a greenscreen. She had her graphics on Ultra and used prim projectors as light sources.
“I usually do 20-30 shots from different angles, with different WindLights and light settings. I then choose the image that I like best. Then I cut it out with Photoshop. The greenscreen simplifies cutting out.” She has been working in PhotoShop for ten years and is self-taught.
She works on the avatar, painting the hair to make it look more realistic. She uses a Wacom Intuos tablet for that. “So I paint hair, correct lighting conditions and try to give the picture a more dynamic look and details.”
When she is finished, she starts on the background. She uses a lot of free images from sites like Pixabay or Pexels. She pointed out there are many other license-free images sites as well as backgrounds we can shoot in-world. “In this picture, I really wanted to use the "glitch" effect. So it looks like half of the picture was taken with a bad or damaged camera. It looks impressive, but is very easy to do. There are numerous tutorials on YouTube. Simply enter "glitch" and "photoshop." So I Googled and there were some 9.7 million results. This was the first.
Lizz continued by explaining that Photoshop layers “make it possible to "fuse" different material together. For example, the city that can be seen in the background consists of 5 pictures. And the fires in the foreground "are nature photographs from one of the two stock photo portals mentioned, on which lava fountains are rising that are burning.”
She uses free brushes that you can download from Deviant Art or Brusheezy. Brushes work like stamps. This is how she added the digital text and symbols above the left eye. She can spend a few hours creating a picture like this. When she is satisfied with the image, she will “fine-tune” it in Camera Raw, a Photoshop tool. In Camera Raw she will adjust the sharpness, contrast, and dynamics. “Then I put my signature on it and that's it.”
“I like strong contrasts and a lot of color. I think you can see that pretty well in my stream.
"Every picture is a creative process and I never know exactly what it will look like in the end. I usually only have a rough idea.”
She made a video to show her editing process for “Raven” though she describes this as a very simple picture.
This picture is called “Life Is Everywhere” and she posted a “speed art” video following her process on YouTube (see below). No matter what you’re doing, though, her most essential piece of advice is that you take your time.
“Time is an essential factor, and taking a picture can take one to two hours. Time gives wings to creativity. I'm not a professional myself, there are so much better pictures. But I definitely enjoy it and SL is full of talented artists.”
She recommends GIMP or Photoshop Elements if Photoshop is out of your budget. She also suggests Photopea as a web-based editing alternative. So go check out her work and perhaps try experimenting with your own work.
See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog.
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