Froukje as a Dryad
A friend of some years, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser asked me to be the photographer during her PhD ceremony and the party later on. Apart from having no idea what to buy, I thought giving something personal would be nicer anyway. So far, I had never done a portrait in my Photoshop experiments, so I thought this would be the perfect time.
First I asked Froukje if I could take her picture, which was fine, but led to a lot of guessing what it would be for. Besides making it, leaving her in the dark was part of the fun too. I settled on a photo of her profile, mainly because it allowed for asymmetry, as opposed to a full-face shot. The main reason for me doing a landscape orientation was that I didn't want her face to become the only thing to be composited with other imagery. My fear was that it would turn her in some kind of Frankenstein's monster if I would.
A consequence of placing a head in a landscape frame is that it leave a lot of open space. Not the most original way perhaps, I chose to extend her hair by creating a number of vector paths, which initially looked like ribbons or dreadlocks, when I colored them. To me however, they looked liked branches, so I decided Froukje would be a dryad. By changing her skin tone and applying a pattern from Spiral Graphics to her skin, her face started looking more and more like a forest statue.
Initially, I intended to use the picture of the dead leaves for the background, but because I accidently layered it on top of the composition. It turned out to fit Froukje's face perfectly with bit of transforming. While I thought I was done with the leaves, it happened to fit the background too, not in the slightest because of the neutral concrete floor underneath the dead leaves. This, however, didn't happen until I had created the rest of the background.
Besides the dead leaves, I took two macro shot of some grass and rotated one of them by 180º and made it slightly yellow. With a lot of masking, blurring and blending I blended the grass with macro shots of a sand landscape and a clay sculpture and added the dead leaves. I finished up the composition by doing some contrast enhancements and selective blurring, especially underneath her hair. And yes, Froukje was very happy with it.