Digipak ad development process of the hands

Final product

I wanted to incorporate the idea of the blood on the protagonist's hands as that is what is shown in my 'take me to church' music video. I thought this would be iconic and would make a big visual impact for my digipak and my ad for the digipak. I had an exact idea of what I wanted it to look like so I merged an image of my hands and a similar image of bloodied hands that I found on the internet. I did not have to be wary of copyright as I knew the final product would not have enough resemblance to the original image.

I did this by making multiple layers and putting them into a folder to group them together to essentially make the final version of the image one layer. This allowed me to move all the layers at once instead of separately essentially allowing me to treat them as one image.

First, I cropped out my hands by using the magnetic lasso tool to get the hands. What I wanted was to get the hands coming out of the darkness similar to the internet reference image I used. To do this I used the magnetic lasso tool on the internet image and cropped out the arms to give myself forearms, this is something you can see in the second image above. In the third image, you can see that I added some slight shading to the bottom of the fingers to make the hands fit into the lighting of the image.

I then used the magnetic lasso tool to crop out the blood on the other image of the hand's and move it about so it fit my own hands.  I had to separately move the blood element on each hand and put them onto their own layer. I then had to start to incorporate my own digital artistic skills to make the blood fit in with the lighting and add more blood when needed.