Creating a zombie in Photoshop – adding blood and gore
Posted on October 7, 2008 by Phil no comments yet
Now we have a more blood thirsty look going on we really need to get rid of some of those vibrant colours like the blue shirt and start to really set the scene.
Step 1:
Open up our zombie photoshop file and arm yourself with the pen tool. Create a path around the shirt and braces and make a selection from it. If you don’t know how to use the pen tool I strongly suggest you learn to but for now just go into quickmask and paint in the area. Add in a new solid color adjustment layer with a nice dark colour, almost black, and set its blend mode to color. No more bright blue!
Don’t worry about all the extra layers in the image above, I’m a few steps ahead with my image.
Step 2:
For this step you will need to have installed some splatter or blood spray brushes which a readily available over the web and can be found here. Once downloaded simply go to the brushes palette and from the options select Load brushes, find your ABR file and load them in. Next choose a nice big splat brush and create a new layer above the colour layer for the shirt. Add a nice big blood coloured splat over her body and change the layers blend mode to multiply. you may need to tidy up the edges if the splat went off the body and perhaps reduce the opacity a bit.
Step 3:
Now we want to add some spray blood to her arms and body with a scattered splat effect brush, do this on a new layer set above the big splat layer and have its blend mode set to multiply before you start painting. Just go for it here until you get a look you like, I think I went a little overboard but never mind! I also added a big splat of blood to the wall and added a layer mask to paint out the areas I wanted hidden.
You should now have a more convincing feel to the image and a lot more blood and gore. Next tutorial we will look at some adjustments to give it a dark creepy feel and some filter effects to add more drama. We will also be using smart objects and filters so go upgrade to CS3, you know its worth it or just wait for CS4 to arrive.
Here’s what we will have after the next tutorial….
