Making a model a dark elf, without special makeup or prosthetic applications...

Greetings to everyone. As you've noted (possibly), I have been absent from the Steemit scene for a bit, but this post will hopefully give some of the explanation as to why. For the rest of the reason... (Gollum voice) shouldn't ask us...not it's business. Seriously though, I've been finishing up the second book of the Pelmythia series and getting it ready for the February 28th release, and have started the third book, so I have been away in writer land.

So, to business. I wanted to showcase the malicient elf priestess who is a key character in the first three novels, yet I do not have the budget behind me that Peter Jackson had when making both trilogies of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. How can I do this then? Well, that, my dear reader, is what is known as improvisation, digital manipulation, and a WHOLE lot of prayer.

While not having access to said budget, I utilized green material given to me from my mother who is a seamstress (she had bought three yards of it for a quilt, only to realize the green would not fit the color scheme she was going for). Armed with this and the built-in camera of my smart phone, I contacted my model and set up a shoot. This is the raw picture chosen from the 109 shots taken:

I used both paint.net and GIMP 2.8 to remove the background:

Note that you can still see remnants of the background, but my primary focus at this stage was removing it from the model. Now I focused on manipulating the color of her skin and hair, without altering the caftan she wore to represent Hyra Moonwarper.

To achieve this, I opened a second copy of the same image inside paint.net and altered the hue and saturation to fit the desired look, and had to manually select her hair, face, and hands with the lasso tool. I then copied and pasted them to a second layer of the original image. Her eyes and hair did not fit the look I was going for, so I flattened the image and saved it, and opened GIMP 2.8 to add the alterations in which I was seeking.

This is where a lot of prayer came into play. The hair was too flat for my liking, so I decided to add depth via airbrush of three different colors.

While it did add some depth to the hair, as well as adding a dark crimson to her eyes, it was not where I wanted it to be. So, I started over...AGAIN... but with a completely different approach that turned into several happy accidents.

The longer hair with the flowing style added both depth and seduction to the image of the model, giving her the look of the malicient elf priestess Hyra Moonwarper. Having cleaned up all the nasty crappy junk around her, it was time to put her on the cover and add the magic in her lifted right hand. This is the final product, and the front cover of book 2 of the Pelmythia main series:

And that, my dear reader, is how to create a dark elf with no budget for makeup or prosthetics.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to view my post. The Raven's Call will be released February 28th, 2019 on Amazon. Visit our website listed below for more information regarding the Pelmythia series, including multiple promotional videos for past releases and this upcoming release. Until next time...

Pelmythia: The Raven's Call, Sword and Phoenix logo copyrights owned by Alpha Wolf LLC
Model: Ashley Maddox
www.alphawolfllc.co