Geometric Portraits

Easy version. Just stick the photo in a website!
But as you can see, it doesn't work too well.

So, I dunno about you, but I believe that almost all facial expressions are universal. Almost everyone can understand the facial expressions can make. For example, a smile. You know how I can tell that smiling is something people are born with? Because they smile as babies when they're happy. Frowning, in many cases, shows disapproval or disappointment. So, even if you're from somewhere like Brazil, or Germany, or China, I'm pretty sure that you'd understand what I meant if I smiled at a unique food dish, or frowned after being rejected from a baseball team, or anything like that. However, some facial expressions in certain places are not inherited naturally. Many expressions are a result of people or society teaching their children whether something is good or not, but even as babies, we all understand a smile, laughter, and crying.

Poly-1 Using outlines to make the image
looks a little funky though

Wow, that was probably the first blog post I've made that DIDDN'T start with "Hey here's a new G.T. project I'm gonna talk about it now." But this new project is.... drumroll please..... (bup bup bup.... bup bup... bap... bap boop bup...) I really need to afford a good drummer... Anyway, it's low poly portraits! Any idea what that is? I sure didn't! But because of my extensive research on (ahem, wikipedia) I found out! Low poly portraits are basically used "for modeling graphics quickly and efficiently using simple 3-5 sided shapes." -Linden's vocabulary 2016. A link to some examples can be found here. Anyway, I made mine, which you can also see scattered across the blog post, using PhotoShop, some steps, and a WHOLE lotta time. The first thing you want to do is to get a photo of yourself or someone else or pretty much anything. Pull it into photoshop, activate the Grid, and lock your portrait layer. Using the line tool at about 5 pixels in an easily identifiable color, (I used red) start drawing an outline for your subject in the photo. Make sure each line starts and ends at either a horizontal or vertical grid line, and all the lines connect. Once you've done that, merge the lines and name it "outline" then start using the line tool to outline the main features, if you're doing a face, this would be hair, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. Then you just kinda start connecting the lines, making sure that all the shapes you make are triangles. Yes, triangles. At places with more detail, use more smaller triangles. For large similarly-colored spaces use bigger and fewer triangles. Once you've finished with that, which takes a while, merge all of the lines together, and copy your photo layer. Be sure to be working in the copy layer, so if something goes wrong, you can delete it. Then, you use the polygonal lasso tool and select triangles individually, every time going to Filter-Blur-Average (after you do it once you can just use Command-F) to flatten the shape. Do that for every single triangle. All of them. Then just cut out the photo and you should be done! Ez-Pz-Lemn-Squizi

Poly-2 Without outlines, looks a little better
FYI this is a photo of my brother.

So, as you can see, Poly-2 has quite a few differences from Poly-1. Mainly that it doesn't look unnerving, but there were quite a few differences along the way. First of all, there were no outlines. Just lasso-ing various triangles and coloring them. Secondly, instead of going to Filter-Blur-Average, you use the eyedropper tool to select a color that would look good and stand out from the other triangles and fill it with that. Shortcuts for these keys are: Polygonal Lasso Tool: L  Eyedropper tool: I  Fill triangle: ALT-Delete. Pretty easy. Then, once you've selected and filled all the triangles with unique colors, (you can use manual color select to make them more unique) you add a Curves adjustment layer and tweak it a bit to make the colors pop even more. Then, you cut out your image, copy the background AGAIN, and go to filter-artistic-cutout for the background. Tweak it up a bit, find a good cutout setting, make it look all polygonal by adjusting the settings, and then click apply. Then, you add a color balance adjustment layer that affects the background but not the subject, and make it all quirky and weird to make the subject pop EVEN MOAR. If you want, you can even select parts of the background and copy and distort them, or make an outline for your subject, basically get creative. Then you should have something that looks really cool, and you're done! EZ-PZ-LEMN-SQUIZI

Have an EZ PZ day,
-Linden

Final Poly-3 with broken glass effect! I like it