Clipart tattoos

I thought I'd try an effect I've been itching to do for some time, if for no other reason than to see if I could do it. The thought occurred to me awhile back that it would be kind of cool to take a rather useless piece of clip art and affix it to skin in a photo. That really doesn't sound too hard, right?

What I am going to show you is a bit more complicated than simply changing the blending mode of a layer, so I hope you not only enjoy it but take something away from it as well. Let's get started!

I've chosen this photo for a few reasons. First, the woman in the picture is displaying enough skin to affix the tattoo. Secondly, I picked this one because of the angle at which the photo was taken. This forces me to bend the tattoo to match the pose. Third, the manner in which the wet hair courses over the shoulder will need to be addressed, and last the water drops have to seem to be on the tattoo rather than the other way around. There is a lot to consider, but I think we can pull this off without too much pain and suffering. Now I'll choose my clipart for the tattoo.

I'll just open it and set it aside for now. There are a couple items concerning the photo that need to be taken care of at the outset.
Duplicate the background layer.

In order to conform the clipart to the shape and angle of the shoulder, we will have to use a displacement map created from the image itself. The displacement map we will create will be using one of the channels, either red, green or blue, as the foundation. Open the Channels palette.

What I'm looking for is the channel that will give me the sharpest contrast between the dark and light areas. First, select just the red channel.

There isn't a lot of contrast in that version, especially in the area we'll be working on.
Select just the green channel.

That channel has a bit depth of contrast. Let's take a look at the blue channel and see what that gives us.

That's what I'm looking for. The blue channel clearly has more contrast than the others. We'll use this channel to create our map.
Duplicate the blue channel in the Channels palette.

We'll need to duplicate this channel and save the duplicate as a new image. Right click the blue channel copy and select Duplicate Channel.

Save the duplicate channel as a new document, name it and click OK.

The image we'll be using as the map is open still…that's ok, as I want to do a little editing to it first. When I'm warping the clipart with the map, I don't really want the clipart to have bumps caused by the water drops on the map. I'll just use the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush to clean up the area where the tattoo will be. Do this on the displacement map image and not the original photo.

Apply a Gaussian Blur to the map image.

I'm going to tweak the contrast of this image even more, and work to increase the color separation between the lights and the darks.

I'm going to further darken the contour of the shoulder blade with the burn tool applied to the highlights, darkening the reflection on the skin over the bone.

Likewise, I'll use the Dodge tool to lighten other areas.

Now save the displacement map image to your hard drive. Remember where you put it and what you named it, as we'll need it shortly.

Go back to the original image. Deselect the Blue Copy channel and select the RGB channel.

Now go to your clip art image.

I won't need any of the white, as the skin tone will fill in those areas once the tattoo is affixed. Go to Select>Color Range and click on the white area with the eyedropper. Then go to Select>Inverse to select the black, blue and red portions of the eagle symbol.

Copy the selection and paste it into the image of the woman. Make sure the new layer is at the top of the stack in the Layers Palette.

If you need to resize the clip art you have chosen, do so with the Transform tools so that the art fits relatively well in the area you want the tattoo to be.
While playing with the transform tools, you will also want to change the perspective of the clipart to best-match the angle of the surface the tattoo is going to be placed on. For instance, one side of the tattoo will be farther from the camera than the other, so this needs be addressed, also with the transform tools.

Let's go ahead and work on applying the displacement map we created. Go to Filter>Distort>Displace.

Enter displacement settings of 20% for both horizontal and vertical. The bottom 2 areas don't matter…they won't affect what we are doing. Click OK. Photoshop will now ask you for the displacement map. Find the one just created, select it and click OK. The eagle will warp a bit to better fit the map, and therefore the shoulder.

Now we are at a point where it may seem as if a mistake occurred. Shouldn't the hair have been erased from the map image? Not really. Actually this next trick will help us in 2 ways. We will remove the clip art from the hair strands, as well as provide reflections/light spots where the water drops appear in the tattoo.
First, turn off the clip art layer in the Layers palette. Next, select the background copy layer.

Go to Select>Color Range. With the Eye Dropper, select the brown tone of the hair. Hold down the shift key and click on darker and lighter pixels, staying within the hair. What we are looking for is a selection similar to what you see in the next example.

Once you think you have it, click OK. Now select the clip art layer again and hit the delete key to erase the contents of your selection. Go to Select>Deselect and look at the image. You should have something similar to this:

See how some of the ink from the tattoo has been deleted, making it appear blended with the skin? We are going to enhance that a bit by changing the blending mode for the clip art layer to Overlay.

In the photo, the woman tends to get blurry as she gets farther from the camera. We need to duplicate that effect for the clip art also. We can do this with the application of a couple quick masks. Click the Add a Mask icon on the bottom of the layers palette.

Select the gradient tool. Choose a standard black to white gradual radial gradient in the options bar. Select the Reverse checkbox, effectively changing the gradient to white-to-black.

Select a spot in the lower left of the clipart and draw the gradient up and to the left. Your image should resemble this:

Duplicate the clipart layer, mask and all.

Select the mask in the duplicate layer. Go to Image>Adjust>Invert.

Now select the image icon of the layer in the layers palette. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and blur the non-masked area slightly.

Click OK.
If the experiment worked for you, you should have a reasonable looking tattoo.

I apologize for the length of this tutorial/short book, but I hope you found some of the techniques involved useful.