Beau Bo D’Or

New image for Channel 4 News - Here.

For those of you interested in creating digital images, I’ll post a fuller explanation of how I created this tomorrow when I post the image on my blog. Sod it, here’s a run-through posted below.
This may sound a tad defensive but what the hell :
After having a conversation with a bloke whose views I respect, I think it best to clarify that, although I used a ‘plugin’ to create the brushstrokes effects, this was far from a one-click operation.
The whole image was created from scratch - clothes, background, everything.
(Believe it or not, in some countries, there is a grey area on copyright about photographic representation of images which are now in the public domain.)
As far as I know there is no plugin that will change stroke size, depth, direction, swirl and adjust colour, hue, add shadows, highlights etc. on different parts of the image.
And the only plugin I have to do some of the work has a myriad of settings which you have to mess around with to get each part looking right.
There was quite a bit of ‘manual’ work involved - honest !

Some of the layers you see above had already been merged - The hat layer, for example, was composed of several different shapes on different layers, with different brush stroke dimensions and directions, then warped and the burn and dodge tool applied.
You may see duplicate layers as well - They are in fact similar but with different sharpness and hue settings - They work with each other to create the overall effect.
The added problem when creating an image like this is keeping an eye on how it will appear at the size required for the web.
The image may look OK at a much larger size but when shrunk, you may lose sharpness and detail. This means frequently copying the merged layers, pasting into a new, flat image and resizing.
However, the benefit of reducing the size is that you can’t see all the errors I made.