Child of the Stars

Today my post is about a composite I did of my daughter, inspired by the opening credits of Ice Fantasy! Ice Fantasy is a Chinese drama (you can watch it on DramaFever!), that our family loves to watch, and we absolutely love some of the visual effects in the show. The show is very artistic, there's a buuuuuunch of CGI, colors and costumes that are a feast for the eyes. I did this entirely in Gimp 2!

So to start, I used this picture of my daughter from our Halloween sessions:

I didn't want the face paint, however. So I had to airbrush out that part. I very carefully kept matching colors of her face to my airbrush, and meticulously covered up all of that face paint. The results:

The Ice Fantasy opening credits have a black background. Obviously, this busy, wooded background was not going to work for that! I opened the picture in another window of Gimp 2, and made it black and white. What I wanted to get rid of I put in black, and what I wanted to keep is in white, so that it can be used as a mask. I'll make a tutorial on how to do this later, there are several ways to get rid of a background! This is the black and white picture:

After I made the mask the way I wanted, I went back to the other window, and created a mask. Making sure I have the mask selected, I copied and pasted my black and white blob onto the mask. Everything black became transparent, and everything white showed through the mask. With some more tweaking on what I wanted to show, smudging the edges to get rid of the sharpness, and adding a black layer under the original picture layer, this was the result:

One of the plug-ins I use for Gimp 2 is called G'MIC-qt, and it offers a lot of layer effects that were created by others. One of these effects is called stardust, and it's a plasma effect with different colors. This is what it looks like after stardust:

I needed less stardust around the portrait so I could swirl it, more like what was in my inspiration. So I cut it down to just a large border around my daughter's portrait:

After using the smudge tool to 'swirl' the stardust in different directions, I made a new layer on top of the black, and used a white brush and a jitter to add points of white on top of the stardust. I turned down the opacity a bit, then added an outer glow to the dots, to make them look more like stars. The final result is this:

Thanks for reading, and upvotes and comments are appreciated!