Day 19 and creating the Xmas Dwagon

First up - Day 19 and what's in the Advent calendar !

Looks like a Tie Striker to chase the rebels away.

The Special Project I mentioned yesterday involves making a new avatar or two. What goes into these ? Lots of patience and photoshopping ... Here's the starting image :

Spot the use of an envelope to act as a constant colour backdrop (it's what I have to hand !) and a Nanoblock kit to raise the fella up a bit. In hindsight, a dotty object isn't the best idea but with liberal use of the Magic Selector (a thing that selects a block of colour), the Free Select Tool and the delete key, you can turn that into :

And you'll then want to trim the image down a fair bit and add an Alpha Channel to make the background transparent. This is the first layer of what I'm hoping to make.

Layers are very important. I'll have the fella above as the main layer and I'll add the rest as different layers. If you added everything on the same layer, then a mistake made would overwrite something you wanted to keep and then you're at the random mercies of the Undo button.

I want to add something from :

Yep. Dwagon's getting an Evil Cultist Snowmen jumper.

This isn't so much of a cut and paste on top ... I want to have it roughly matching the fella's top. Let's see ...

There we go. This image is two layers, source dwagon plus source Evil Cultist snowmen. The source Evil Cultist Snowmen layer will be deleted later. I just need something to be a source for the lovely Clone Stamp tool.

Part way done. Note the imperfections on the left hand side of the jumper as we look at it. Those will disappear later. I've missed a trick actually as there are a few bits of source image for the jumper that I'd like to make this a high quality effort. Bits of jumper trim, things like that.

A little bit of cutting, pasting, clone tooling and rotating and the sleeves are coming together. I'm not planning to do much more than that coverage.

I think it's almost there ? Don't you ? As well as finishing the sleeves, I've done a little bit of clicking with the Erase tool on various layers. The erase will only take away from the current layer, so with every click you expose more of the source picture underneath. Less jumper, more dwagon.

He could do with a scarf I think but that's probably beyond my photoshop skills. (Actually using the free tool GIMP).

I feel there should be a background. (It might appear overnight ... I've actually written most of this post on Monday!)

Oh and if you're thinking "That looks easy." You can do it too ! Go for it. GIMP is a free tool so all it needs is the hard bit of having an idea and a little patience. The undo button is there to get rid of mistakes and the zoom thing is there to make it easier.

Go for it !