Family Totem Pole

Family Totem Pole

Whenever I can incorporate my love for fun creative portraits and vacation, I am all for it.  I knew I wanted my family to be a part of whatever creation I came up with for our Alaska vacation.  I started to think about things that were Alaskan and looked into the histories of the cities we would be visiting. One of the cities we were vising was Ketchikan which has a Totem Pole Park. Perfect. We could be our own totem pole! I came up with a list of a few hats we could wear to make us animals and I made sure to bring those with us.


Info on the edit:

Actually fairly easy to shoot, most of magic came in photoshop. I wanted us to look like we were a wood statue but still like us.

I used layer masks to isolate us so that edits I made only applied to us and nothing else.

I started with running a watercolor action I have. It creates deep dark black lines and really outlines us. I did it at a very low opacity and only used the outline part of it and didn't mess with the color.

I needed us to be brighter and have a more painted look. I created a new layer over us and choose a color that was close to what our actual clothes color was. I used a soft brush and colored over our clothing. Changed that blending mode to Color Dodge. Played with the opacity. Lots of back and forth on this one, tried many colors until getting the right look.

I needed to "paint" our faces to resemble a totem pole. I achieved this by creating a new layer, choosing a color, changed the blending mode to Multiply, then lowered the opacity to my liking.

Last I added a wood texture on top of us. The wood texture I used was a long wavy piece of wood that was taken fairly close up. I changed the blending mode to soft light, and lowering the opacity to about 50% so the wavy wood lines showed but didn't overpower the people.

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