Are you ready for some Mayhem?

[GbyP]

How to make The Predaturnip
Step1. Spend 2.5 days cursing the tourney host.
I didn't want to do me because I'm boring. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Originally I wanted to do Bill the Cat in his Billy & the Boingers outfit because his hair is green and looks like a salad. But thought if I did Bill, you would know it was mine. Then I remembered seeing a veggie Alien (oddly titled Salad Predator) awhile back and wondered if he had a veggie friend. Strangely he does not. Or if he does, it it well hidden in the depth of the webs. The closest I found was a pumpkin carved like the Predator's head. So thought, "What the hell, why not..." That's about as competitive as I felt.

I found a really nice large painting; the film pics were small and dark. I thought about using an action figure for reference because it was large and well detailed. But I liked the color scheme in the painting more.

Step 2. Spend 6hrs looking for big-ass pics of veggies and fruit that match parts of the pic.
Now here I played a strategic advantage - I work in Seattle's International District and there are some weird-butt veggies and fruit in the tropics and Asia. So rather than Google names of fruit I know, I Googled "Asian spiky fruit" or "tropical stringy vegetable" and stuff like that. For example, did you know that the Japanese love to grow square watermelon? Saves space in stores. So my warping on the armor was really a combo of warp + source.

Step 3. Realizing 7hrs into your 12 hr chop why no one has done a veggie Predator - too much frickin' detail!!! But I couldn't stop.

I sketched the reference pic to map out what fruit I needed where. Then just lots of cloning, lots of warping, lots of dodging & burning (way more than my normal) to get that bruised and unique piece look - for example, I only used 3 string beans for all of the dreads.

The background is 2 fill layers: black on top of lime green. I 'painted' in the black fill layer mask erasing the black foreground to reveal the green beneath (like my reverse-tables werewolf Fear pic).

Finally, I topped off the huge stack of layers with an exposure adjustment layer to make contrast pop and a 40% lime green photo filter adjustment layer to bathe the Predaturnip in a soft glow.

That's it! Now my sources of which I included the reference pic and the Veggie Alien inspiration:


I found a really nice large painting (by Krats on abduzeedo - I have the site bookmarked for inspiration) and decided to use that as my reference mostly because it was huge and detailed. I sketched it to get a general layout and I liked his color scheme so I referenced it for color & texture search when able. I did not use the actual painting in my chop. I guess you can call mine fan art of his fan art. If you are wanting to see my PSD file, I'm willing to share.