Making "Creepy Holly" in Photoshop (Patreon)

Some videos by the creator of "Gateway to Sedona" feature a painting of a creepy nun which is actually kind of cool. To make the parody version with Holly for my video, I needed an picture to work from.

I usually just ask Lauren to send me a phone pic, but the poster needed to be large and look painterly, so I found some older DSLR photos. They were from our first attempt at the "Amazing Water Trick Debunk" video, which we shot 2 years prior to the one that ultimately came out!

One picture had a perfect head-on view. I straightened the angle and isolated the head. Since it was going to be processed to look like a painting, I airbrushed the skin to an extreme degree.

I used the curves tool to color correct the image and make it look more appropriate for outer space. Lauren's hair was very short at the time so I blended it with a bigger hairdo from a stock image.

To make the eyes, I also got a stock pic of a marble. With 2 copies placed and sized to approximate the eyeballs, I masked the layers to the shape of the eyelids. Under these new layers, dabbing some black color with a soft brush added a nice Tim Burton-y eyeshadow. Dabbing some pale green over the eye marble layers and setting the blend mode to "lighten" simulated a slight glow.

Just like the original painting, I added a forehead ornament and blood dripping from the lips. In retrospect, neither of these elements ended up looking good. The logo is too big (to accommodate the tile gap) and the color of the drip, which I changed to avoid looking like blood was not different *enough* and in print, ended up blending with the lips. But...what are ya gonna do.

I threw some stars from a NASA photo in the background and painted a bright blue halo to make the hair pop against the darkness.

Finally, I processed a flattened version of the composition with the oil paint filter, trying different settings until it looked right.

The final image, designed for a 26"x40" frame, was split into 8"x10" tiles that would fit on individual sheets of printer paper with a 1/4" gutters. 

Actually, I calculated all that first and worked with a tile grid overlay to avoid putting important details in the tile gutters, but it would've been annoying to show that grid in every illustration here.

If you're subscribed at the Episode Artwork pledge level, I'm making the full, super-high-resolution poster file available for download there, so you can print your very own!

Don't play any strange audio tone combinations near it though. Just in case.