Mental Wave Explosion

Tutorial here.

First I opened the road photo to use as my background. I used a layer mask to cut out the guy from another photo, and placed him in the road photo. I made a selection of the guy to create his shadow on a new layer. Then I used the ellipse tool and direction selection tool to create the mental wave shape. I used the clouds tool and used the selection of the ellipse from before to make the clouds only appear within that shape. Then I used the liquify tool to make the shape appear to be bulging. I repeated this step three times. I used the outer glow tool to give the shape its desired effects. I used the elliptical marquee tool to make the shadow underneath the shape and then used the zig-zag tool to create the ripples. Next, I added the truck and created a shadow the same way I made the shadow for the guy. Then I just made a ton of adjustments with the lighting and coloring to make it the way that I wanted.

Good and Evil

Tutorial here.

This tutorial splits a face in half to make a good side and an evil side. First, I used a single column marquee to make the line in the middle. Evil side: First I desaturated the left side and then used the brush tool to make the eye black. I used a concrete texture for the skin and used a layer mask and erased over the eyes and lips. Then I used to burn tool to hollow out the eyes and cheekbone area. The tutorial included a link to a brush set to make make-up smudges on the face. Good side: I used the spot healing brush and gaussian blur to make the skin look perfect. Then I used an elliptical marquee to select the eye and made it a bright blue color. Then I used a star brush and changed the settings to make them look random and put some over various parts of the face.

Chocolate Skull

Chocolate skull tutorial here. The point of this tutorial was to take a realistic skull and make it look like melting chocolate. It was pretty simple (only a few tools were used) but the detail was very important. I started by making the skull black and white and duplicating the layer and making it a chocolate brown color. Then I used the smudge tool to make 'drips' coming from the skull. This was pretty easy but I don't see how the person who made the tutorial made the little ball at the end of the drip to make it look really. Then I added some white for highlights and smudged those out too. Next, I found a cake background and dragged the skull over it. I used the clone stamp and smudge tool to make things blend together. The red background was not high enough, so I found a red fabric texture and added and used the clone stamp and smudge tool again to make it blend.