Zombiefied People

Pale Skin

Zombies are dead. And they have been for a while. When a person dies, the blood stops flowing through their body not giving the skin that characteristic redish look. Everyone will look much paler then they normally should.

And since Nicole is from Hawaii, her skin is a bit tanned. But you can use this technique with ANY skintype. Just make sure that you don't overdo it. For example with people with a very dark skintone. If you overdo it, they tend to look more like albino's and we don't want that.

For this tutorial I've chosen a very nice pose on which we can add loads of things that will be cool!

Create a new layer on top of the photo and set the blending-mode to Color and select a brush and start brushing with black over the skin.

Lower the opacity slightly and notice that your person gets that death-look written all over him/her.

Now grab your black brush again, but this time a VERY small size. 1px or 2px is enough. Then zoom in a lot if that makes you paint a little better.

With the blending-mode of a new layer set to Overlay, lower the opacity slightly and start brushing small cuts and bruises around the face and arms.

Imagine this zombie having to fight it's way through flocks of zombies and having his/her head bashed in a few times by objects.

Adding the Bones

Now with the image supplied by sxc.hu, use these bones and paste them into your document and press Ctrl+T to transform it down to a size suitable for the person we're turning into a zombie.

Press Ctrl+L to play with the sliders of the levels of the image to make the bones look more real and matching to the image you're using. This is different for every image, just make sure that the amount of shading and lighting in the image are almost the same as the image you're using.

Then press Ctrl+T again to make it a little smaller and rotate it. Then place it near the arm.

Press Ctrl+U and drag the middle slider (the saturation) some to the left to make it look a little greyer. Also drag the lower slider a little too the left a little to make it darker if needed.

Then grab your Pen-Tool or Lasso-Tool or Polygonal Lasso-Tool and cut away all the white in the bones-image and the other bone as well. Also cut a little off the bone to make it look like only a part of the bone is coming out his/her arm.

Then open up a new layer above the bones layer and press Ctrl+G or Ctrl+Shift+G to mask it with the layer below and use your black brush at around 4px to brush a little at the bottom where the brush and the skin are connecting. Lower the opacity to make it a little transparent.

Grab the Burn-Tool and press D to reset your colors to black and white. Then look at the taskbar and set the range to Shadows and the exposure to 20%. Then start brushing around the bone-area on the original photo-layer. This will make it look like the skin is all rotten and the bone is coming right through.

Continue with the Burn-Tool on the face and notice that if you brush over the same area twice or more then once, the color will get "burned" like the tool's name. Be very carefull with this/ You don't want to make it too red. That's why your trusty friend "Ctrl+Z" is always there to save the day!

Pay special attention to the area around the eyes and mouth to give the eyes that death-look and the mouth.. well let's just say I got a surprise for that later!

Blood Everywhere

From the great, yet sick, site AngryBlue.com, download the AngryBlue-brushes pack v1 and use the largest brush of them all to brush around your document on a new layer.

Set the color to standard red and just play around with the placing. Remember that you can always remove pieces of the blood if unwanted, so don't worry and place it away!

Set the blending-mode of the blood to Multyply and press Ctrl+U to darked it a little by dragging the bottom slider a little to the left. Your blood should look very real. Blood may be very red, but we're talking about zombies who have been out for days with blood on their bodies and clothes which has gone old. And the older blood gets, the darker it gets!

Grab your Eraser and just erase anything blood-related outside the person itself. Don't worry about the unwanted blood inside the person. We'll fix that later!

Now with the Eraser again, brush away all the blood you think is too much. If you're using the same image as mine, make sure the right part of her belly is empty, because we're gonna do some cool stuff to that later!