Spider-Man action figure digital artwork

A new kind of post from me this time. My fellow Steem Warrior @spacetrucker had an idea that he talked to me about, knowing that I am a digital artist and having seen countless images of my work. He took a few photographs of his action figures against a green background, wanting to see if they could be placed over a fitting picture of New York City. We have a mutual friend and fellow Steem Warrior @tattoodjay who is a professional photographer in New York City, and has taken so many amazing pictures of the city and its architecture, so I got on board and combined my two fellow Steemians' work to bring @spacetrucker's vision to reality.

We start with the chosen image, seen below against the green background.

We open up paint.net and load the image up, and use the magic wand icon to remove the green background.

The wand does well, but it's notorious for leaving small speckles peppered throughout the image. So in order for me to see these remnants (because in the program, the background is transparent), we add a second layer and color it completely red. Then when we pull the initial image to the foreground, the hidden nasty green crap is blatantly obvious.

Then we make use of the lasso tool, and focus on Spidey's body, making sure to separate the green goo from the outfit without removing sections of the outfit itself. This isn't an easy process (especially when you're only able to use a mouse and not a tablet with a stylus), but time and patience yields the proper results.

Note that there is still a bit of a green reflection on Spidey. If one wanted, you could spend hours with the program GIMP and reconstruct the outfit to completely remove the reflection, but for this project, we're gonna cheat a little bit. Instead of loading the image to GIMP and spending most of the day perfecting it, we manipulate the lighting tool to darken Spidey a bit, effectively taking most of the glare away. We make a copy of Spidey and put a second layer above him, and paste the darkened image on top. Then we manipulate the saturation value to make the second copy completely black. Bringing the initial Spidey to the foreground, we inflict the blackened Spidey with a Gaussian blur, giving the appearance of shadow behind him.

Now we add the amazing photo taken by @tattoodjay.

And along comes a spider...

With a slight borrowing from a Marvel image, I was able to acquire Spider-Man's web.

Now with a little tweaking here and there, and some cropping of the image, we have our final image: Spider-Man, swinging through New York City.

I hope you all enjoyed this post, and many thanks to @spacetrucker and @tattoodjay for their awesome images that they have shared with all of us. Both of these individuals produce beautiful work, so give them a look and an up vote or a comment. All comments on this post are welcomed and up votes are always greatly appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your day!