Getting the Hair and Eyes Right
The next part involved getting the hair and eyes right. I could have left the hair as original, the light blonde color, but I decided to whiten it to further enhance the character’s inherent magical nature. (Since I was still editing the story, I could easily modify the internal descriptions to reflect that.) However, I didn’t want to lose the shading and details of the hair: doing so would leave the image with a solid white cloud over the character’s head, which would not fit in with the overall look I was going for.
Instead, I used a fluffy eraser to carefully blot out the hair from the color image, leaving the black&white image underneath it alone. This was done before compressing the two images into one layer, which was necessary for the next step, getting the eyes right.
The eyes were a little harder than the hair.
For one thing, there was the eyeshadow that extended down across the inner side of the eye. I felt that was entirely inappropriate for the character, so I removed it by applying the clone stamp to sample the model’s skin from around and below the eye and then blotted out the coloration beside the eyes.
For another, the model’s eye colors were, well, mundane. I have a stock of brushes that are irises, so I selected one and selected the deep blue color. However, I could not simply paste the eye directly over the existing eyes, because the eyelids were obscuring parts of the existing irises, so instead I erased the existing eyes, then I created another layer underneath the image and painted the eyes there, so they would appear underneath the existing eyelids.
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