Earlier today, Jim tweeted some pictures of architecture around his ‘hood. One in particular caught my eye:
The crying eyes of Medusa. pic.twitter.com/WMMsHw0ZQ3
— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 2, 2016
Medusa makes me think Harryhausen, so I had to try to animate it. It wasn’t all that difficult. I opened the image in Photoshop and duplicated the background layer. In my new layer, I needed to get rid of the tears so I would have a clean face for the tears to roll down. Doing that was a matter of copying and pasting some selections of areas adjacent to the tears, and then moving the selections on top of the tears. It’s crude, but close enough. A couple corners of my copy and paste selections were too noticeable, so I used the eraser tool to take them out. What I should have done was used a little feathering on the selections to soften the edges so they would blend better. I merged the bits and pieces on to my copied layer, so now I had two – with and without tears
The next thing I needed to do was to separate the tears out onto another layer. I used the polygon select tool, this time with feathering, and selected the tears from my original background layer and did a copy-paste to put them on a new layer, and moved that layer to the top of the pile. Then I made copies of my tears layer, each time moving them a little further down the face. I think I had seven layers of tears. I made an equal number of copies of the tearless face layer, and merged a layer of tears on to each one. Then it was View-Animation and Make Frames from Layers. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. Since I had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done at the start, it really only took a few minutes to make.
Well, I think that that Medusa is a candidate for the Stairs, so who cares if she is sad, she is not a nice one.
But since it was just a few minutes to make it, you have leftover time now to finish the job properly with the animated snake hair.
That’s a job for Harryhausen. Not amateurs like me.