Club Scrap - December 2014 Blog Hop - Reunion

I do hope you all had an extremely Merry Christmas and that Santa brought you all some goodies.

This month I am going to attempt to do something totally different.  This is called Paint Splatter Portrait and I thought that the Reunion kit would be awesome to use for this.

First up, open a photo, duplicate the image and convert it to black and white and then close the original photo.  I am using a photo of my estranged daughter and grandson for this.

Next open up a new image 12" x 12" with a white background.

Now move your photo onto the new canvas you have created and close out the photo.

Next you are going to use a levels adjustment layer to blow out most of the whites and darken the blacks.  Go to Layer>new adjustment layer>levels.

Click the toggle lever on the right and slide it towards the middle to increase the white; click to toggle lever on the left and slide it to the middle to increase the black.  At this point be careful not to go too far with either of these adjustments so that you maintain features on the faces.  Once you have done this hide the background layer and then go to layers>merge visible.

Now you need to add a layer mask.

At this point DON'T PANIC!!

Hopefully your photo will have disappeared.

Choose a brush and set your foreground color to white.

Click on the black mask in the layers panel and begin brushing and/or stamping.  You can adjust the flow and opacity of your brush at any time.  What you are seeing here is a fuzzy round brush "revealing" some of the photo below it.

Here is what I ended up with for this photo and now comes the fun stuff.

I wanted to make a new gradient fill layer so I created a new fill layer above the layers I have worked with so far and made a gradient using the colors from the Reunion kit.  Once you have the gradient set the property of it to overlay or soft light.

Make a new layer and do your gradient.  I have further adjusted mine using the blend options and lowered the opacity of the gradient a bit.

Now you can complete your layout as normal.  I have actually made brushes out of some of the stamps from the reunion kit and will be applying those on their own layers at their own opacities shortly but right now I am looking to see what extras I can use to make this layout work.

Here is what I ended up with:

I hope you have enjoyed this creative process and something totally different.  As always your response means a lot to me so please ask questions if you want to.

The next stop is:

http://craftycolonel.blogspot.com/2014/12/club-scrap-reunion-blog-hop.html