Image 3 - Portrait inspired by Dorian Grey

For my third idea I decided to produce a portrait inspired by the legend of Dorian Grey. I have decided to put a 20th century twist onto the image by using a portrait which is undoubtedly from the 21st century. I am going to signify the outcome of Dorian Grey's life and ageing of the painting by imposing a skull into the portrait.

Dorian Grey - The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of ageing.

Rene Magritte was a surrealist artist. It is said that his intended goal for his work was to challenge observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality and force viewers to become hypersensitive to their surroundings.

In many of Magritte's paintings he superimposed objects into them, like is seen here, to create a sense of mystery. This is similar in theme to what I am going to do. However my final image is going to be more obvious in meaning as the object I am going to impose is a skull and that obviously connotes death.

Skull found at - http://themanwhonevermissed.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html

Texture found at - http://www.psdeluxe.com/tutorials/special-effects-tutorials/sinful-desires-photo-manipulation/

I produced my final image by firstly cropping the portrait. Next using the quick selection tool I removed the skull from its background. I then pasted it as a new layer onto the portrait and used free transform to match it to the size of the existing head. I then reduced the opacity of the skull and erased the areas which covered up the fringe of the model. I left the opacity at 75% to make it look more 'natural' as a face. Next I used the colour balance tool to match the colour of the skull to the model's skin. I then used the quick selection tool again to select the whole of the model's body including the shadow and pasted it onto the textured background which I had already had added as a new layer. I used refine edge so that the shadow didn't look too blocky. Lastly I used the colour replace tool to give the background a pinkish tint and added the poster edges filter as a smart object to the background.

Final Image