Self Portrait - Part 2

Well, I'm still playing with the digital art version of my self-portrait.

Here is roughly where I started:





















One of the critiques I received recommended that I do something to make it more 3 dimensional. So I started playing with filters - the one that worked was poster edges.























I had some other suggestions from that posting at the Digital Image Cafe, so I darkened my face and I decided that a border might be a good thing. I used a technique I learned this week at the photoshop training to "brush" my image back onto a solid layer leaving the brush strokes as a boundary to make it interesting.









Well, I liked the border around it, but I thought it was too plain. My online friend Alberta mentioned playing with the bark pattern. So I took my Fill layer, blended it with a new layer of the bark and added some craqueleur . . . Then I added some shadowing under the bark, but I had to do that with a brush by hand because of the way the bark and face had been "brushed" in.







I am definitely wishing I had done this with "smart filters" and "smart layers" because I now have 3-5 versions of this . . . . I've gotten another good suggestion that I need to try, plus I think my external border is too dark. The first version I tried to fix that did not quite work. So I seem to be having to go back to the originals to play.



Here is my latest effort: I suspect I'll play around a little more with this. To me this one has my face too light - so I'm not fading in and really being "one" with the tree. But it's late. Sometimes I think I am working this one to death. And then at other times, I think I'm making progress toward a final presentation.