I began by literally splitting my image down the middle, choosing the point straight between the eyes.
How it looked with just one side.
I then inserted the board for my character hold. For this I simply used the rounded rectangle tool in white. I then selected the fingers that would be coming over the sign, and cut and re-pasted them as a separate layer. This allowed me to have Alfies body as the bottom layer, with the sign as the middle layer and Alfie's fingers on the top layer, to create the illusion of him holding the sign.
To reduce the sharpness of the cuts around the fingers I simply used the eraser and lightly erased the edges of his fingers in so to blur them around the edges and take a little of the sharpness away.
Here is what the hand look like after using the eraser.
I realised that I would need to erase the branding of Alfie's plain black jacket in so to became him look even more poor, it would be a little ironic for a bum to be wearing a branded jacket. To do this I used the clone stamp tool, and selected the black and shaded parts of the jacket and simply stamped over the brand name. Here is halfway through the process.
And here is the jacket with the brand name completely erased.
I then chose to use the liquify filter to make Alfie look even worse (haha!).
I wanted to focus on his eyes and using the bloat tool I enlarged the bags under his eyes to make them look more prominent, looking like he has serious lag of sleep.
Here is the untouched eye.
Here is after I had finished. I also used the 'pucker' tool to reduce the size of his pupils and take the shine out of his eyes. This makes him look either on the influence of drugs and a lot more evil, and takes the innocence of big shiny blue eyes out.
I then wanted to create a slight illusion of a black eye, my character would then look like he'd been in a few scraps, a classic stereotypical activity of the poor. I did this by using hue/saturation and colour balance effects over that certain part of his eye giving them the purpley tint.
I think selected the whites of his eyes and made them red and bloodshot, connoting either drug use or again serious lack of sleep.
To even further the damage to Alfie's appearance, I reduced the 'vibrance' levels of the image and this is what gives him this ghostly like look.
