Tutorial: How To Create A Textured Face White Walker (From Any Portrait)

The year comes to an end and just before the busy days of watching StarWars and celebrating the holidays I’m rushing to finish some images and close this year off. One of the images that needed to be done was my contribution to the Dark Realm Collective – Black Christmas Art Pack.

I’ve been part of this collective since its conception and we’ve been making awesome dark images throughout the year, mostly themed around festive holidays and events. Naturally we needed to do a Christmas theme.

So for the Christmas art pack we had a few themes to pick from, the themes are more of a guide to get us started.

In the text below I am going to show you how it was done step by step. If you want to use any of the packages from this tutorial, the nice guys from the Image Manipulation Store agreed to provide a 20% off coupon (till Dec 30th), for any of the packages used here. Just use coupon code whitewalker4 on checkout.

I wanted to do a dedicated shoot, but time was running out and I had to choose from work I had already shot a few months ago. The photo was shot during a different shoot of a female model, but I thought it would be fun to use her boyfriend in a shot or two. I was lucky I did because he proved to be the right image to use for my idea to create a Game of Thrones White Walker. (those creeps are scary!!)

Furthermore I had a bunch of photo’s I shot during a family outing in the woods, shots of trees, bark, moss etc. (but you can buy premade ones too)

Combined with the amazing packs from the Texture Store I was confident I would be able to compose a compelling image.

The secret to making this kind of edit look realistic is select different bark textures and then, use the transform warp tool to warp the image over the face, following the contours of the face closely. Then set the layer blending mode to overlay. Rinse and Repeat until the face is covered.

I’m posting the speed edit here and a walk through of what I’m doing and using. Feel free to use this as a guideline to create your own barky photographs: