Patriotic Lips

Today’s episode comes to us from Jodie Brown, who saw a cool photo of a girl with a flag for lipststick. What a cool idea for an episode.

To apply a flag to lips we have to go through many different techniques. First it is important to find a reference image, in this case we are using a photo of a regular flag. To make the flag appear as though it is wrapping around the lips of the subject, we load it into the liquify tool. With the forward warp tool we grab each corner and bring it in. After, we add a little more variation on the pattern with the ripple filter. There are many ways to do this, this is probably the fastest. After we have the flag about how we want it, we use a group and a layer mask to define the flag as only visible around the lips.

Using the layer mask as a selection, we copy the lips onto a new layer and desaturate them – CMD SHIFT U – and use curves CMD M- to make them lighter, this serves as the lighter areas of the flag. At this point the design is still looking a bit flat, because we have not taken the highlights and shadows into account. For the highlights, we make a selection of the lights from the BG layer and paint white on a new layer over top everything. This brings back the natural highlights and brings everything together.