What rustles in the leafs outside,
what anger boiling deep inside,
what darkness lurking beneath the hide,
what fire teasing us, we must abide?

Happy scary month of the year everybody!

We’ve been slapping on effects and tearing away skin for you in this blog post that are our profile pictures for this month! Now we quickly wanted to share the before and after pictures for our little experiment and describe what we’ve done to the pictures in order to fit the theme.

Judith, The Pyromanic Witch

We experimented a bit with the light for this shot and eventually settled for the warm light that went perfectly with the red hair and the candle light with its warm colours.

The black lipstick and runes on the hands are the manual effects, the retouch is elaborate compared to what we usually do and involves additional sparks, flames, flare and the not so unusual dodge and burn to increase contrast to some parts.

Before:

After:

Jonathan, The Statue of Decay

Obviously we had a plastic human skull lying around as a prop, so we utilised that and apart from the usual appearance in shirt and vest applied a bit of black paint.

The strobe light straight from behind is emphasizing on the shape of the (actual) skull and the face is replaced by the fake skull with some rough wacom painted strokes. The overall look is a faded look, the only challenge was matching up the tones of the black of the skull to the rest of the picture, which is why there are three sets of adjustment layers, for skull, background (Jonathan) and one for both.

If we would have to put a song quote on it, it would be this:

Wohin soll denn die Reise geh’n?
Aufs nächste Riff, aufs nächste Riff!
Ein Büschel Haare weht am Mast
Vom Knochenschiff, vom Knochenschiff.

Knochenschiff - Subway To Sally (check it out, it’s worth translating ;))

Before:

After: