"The Gap You Left"

my latest entry for Dark Realm Collective's latest art pack. 

I was bummed that I wouldn't be able to provide an image for this release as I was travelling to New York for a workshop and exhibition and being allround busy to find the time to create an image. 

But it didn’t sit well with me that I would skip creating an image because I was busy. 

The overall theme of this art-pack was Dark Hearts, coinciding with Valentine’s Day and submissions and interpretations where free to fill in but had to be in by February 11.

So there where minor things set in stone, and the rest was creative freedom. And still something in me resisted and had to bail out because of busy-ness.

In my head I needed a plan, I needed time in my studio with all my fancy gear and I needed the right props and model etc. It all needed to be right.

The Trip

So I travelled to New York to do my workshop, everything was planned, I had my studio, my model, my props. And it all fell apart a day before. My model got ill with the flu, and she couldn’t travel or risk infecting others. Which was the right thing to do, no amount of work (no matter how much fun it is) can best a good nights sleep when you’re ill with the flu.

So there I was, no model, but with a fully booked studio and a plan to shoot images for my workshop.

So there I was, in New York, having to find a plan B for the lack of a model. 

I eventually decided to model myself and found some props at an amazing Halloween Costume store…I literally got dragged out by my man, or I would have spent all my cash there. 

Plan B was coming together!! 

Luckily a good friend of mine managed to get me in contact with an actor/model friend of his and I did get the model I needed and the workshop was saved. Well, the workshop was fun and awesome, only my vision of how it needed to be was saved. And we had a great time and some awesome images to edit. (I promise you’ll see them soon)

The day after, their was a meetup with some new and some old friends I made in the US, and we had a freezing blast of a time in Central Park. We all took turns shooting each other and creating on the go, with the few means and props we had. (These images will also follow soon).

seeing everyone being creative and to create on the go, made me decide I shouldn't let anything hold me back on creating an image, and just take the time to do it. Anyway I can.

“Okay you had a great trip! Now tell us about this gruesome image!!”

Right, so I came home, jetlag and all. Trying to stay awake and with nothing much to do, but unpacking. I woke up one morning and just had THE idea for the image, it was simple, it was elegant and it was even doable within a few hours. All I needed was a studio setup, some lights….a model…no wait a minute..I don’t need that at all. I can be my own model (I’ve done 3 years of self-portraits, so I should know how to model for my own images).But I need a blank background, like the one in my studio! No I don’t, I have a blank wall in my bedroom…go figure. And I need Lights!! There is plenty of lights in the bedroom, and there’s still daylight, your camera can handle daylight and some ceiling lights. The light wasn’t important for the concept, it just needed to be even.

But, but..no buts, you can do this, you have all you need right here. 

So I setup in the bedroom, balanced my Olympus camera on the little linnencloset, connected to its wifi with my phone and set focus and an interval shoot for 10 shots, then repeated the proces with different poses until I figured I had enough.

But thats not all, where did the blood and gore come from?

The idea was a simple one, I wanted to create a dark valentines day image. I wanted to have a man stand in front of a wall, with a hole in his body where his heart would be. If I would just create a hole, the whole (see what I did there..) context would be lost, but I thought it funny to create the hole in the shape of a heart, this way it wouldn’t be too gruesome to watch, and kinda leave you thinking. 

So I got my heart shape, the bloddspatters came from RAWExchange’s stock image store and textures.com. And I started compositing it all. I used the Curvature Pen Tool to cut out my shape. I’ve been using the Curvature Pen tool for most of my cutouts lately, as I find it very intuitive and less complex then the normal Pen Tool.

To add the heart shaped hole I grouped the man’s image into a new group and added a new layer mask to that group, this is a perfect way to create multiple layer masks without destroying the once you already made.

The blood on the wall was made by adding different splatters with a multiply blend mode on top of each other. This was possible because most of the splatters where on a white backdrop, so using multiply got rid of the whites and just left the rest.

The heart shaped hole felt a bit “empty” and I tried different approaches but none of them worked satisfyingly. Just showing the wall, looked lame and flat.It needed more depth to it. And the heart shape itself was also too graphic.

So I decided that I’d show some bone beneath the skin. I found a ribcage, of a cat of the skeleton pack,  at the right angle it would work just well. 

I masked the ribs out and then masked those again, to look like cracked bones. Adding shadow to make them fit more by drawing shadows on a layer with a multiply blend mode. 

It still didn’t look right so I butchered together some images of entrails and gory bloody stuff, which I just had lying around (oh the things you find online) and finished it off with some hand drawn drips of blood. 

To add some depth to the drips I made a new layer and added an emboss effect to the layer (you can find the emboss effect under the FX button in your layers panel (who even uses this tool?)

Some more blood spatters and smudges with some custom brushes and the composite was done.

The shortcut, and how it added more problems

I ALWAYS work non-destructive, all my layers are separate elements, and I even go as far as making a new layer for each brushstroke…sometimes. I never…ever…use a Stamp-Visible-Layer to do a liquify or add an effect. I use a magic button in the Retouching Toolkit  called Smart Liquify, which makes a Stamp-Visible-Layer, but with editing capabilities inside it. Its basically a smart object, inside your layer stack, allowing you to adjust the layers below, and then update the Smart Liquify Layer to incorporate the new changes. Its really really smart, and it works wonders. It also has some drawbacks since CC2018, where NIK tools sometimes crashes when you add that plugin to the Smart-Liquify layer. So this time I decided to skip the smart liquify and just do a Stamp-Visible-Layer and be done with it. Add some NIK tools effects on it, then maybe some more and finished. 

But I almost always add Detail Extraction in NIK tools, which is the best way to add more structure on an image. It enhances detail….and sadly also some missed edge lines on the textures I used for the splatter effect. And since I couldn’t go back I saw them when I finished the image and was ready to export…damn… 

So I had a few choices, I could redo the grading and NIK tools effects or get rif of the lines by ways of clone-stamping…I chose the latter one, it was either way going to take time. But the clone stamp proved to be quicker. Lesson learnt…don’t take the shortcut…

Now sit back and watch the creation of the image in high speed (image completion time was 2 hrs, but I’ve boiled it down to ±4 min)

and if you're really interested in the video, you can buy a full process video here, 2hrs of watching me create this image in Photoshop, warts and all. You'll help support me and my artworks! So thank you for that!

https://gum.co/DRC1