It’s officially October so let the creepy tuts keep rolling in. Today we’re going to go through the process of making one of those disturbing undead nurses from Silent Hill.

Here is a reference image.

This is the sweet and lovely nurse that is going to undergo the unfortunate transformation. Special assistance comes from this mummy man.

Another photo that’s going to help out is this mouth-watering mutilated cow slab.

The curious hole that’s in the middle of the meat should work nicely for the rotting eye socket. Polygon Select an area of the meat and Copy/Paste onto the nurse head. I lined up the gaping wound with her right eye.

Repeat the process with another portion of facemeat using Ctrl+T to rotate and scale accordingly.

Clip out the mummy and position the mask over the face. Clip out some of the bandages and reposition. I took the diagonal one and flipped it to reveal the eye socket more.

Take some bandages from the forehead to go around the cheek and jaw. Once satisfied with the bandages, select all layers with bandage parts and Ctrl+E to merge only those layers.

Right click that merged layer and duplicate it. We’re going to set the blending mode to “Linear Burn” in the Layers Panel. This mode seems to really bring out that Silent Hill highly-exposed aesthetic.

Go to to the original nurse image layer and click Ctrl+U. This will bring up the Hue/Saturation adjustments. We’re going to drop the Saturation down to pull out some of the color to make it a little more monochromatic.

Add a new layer at the very top and fill it with a golden or rusty color. I used color #482806. Set the fill to 65% and use Color Burn mode and you’ll start to see drastic mood changes from the original image.

The hell nurse seems to have some sort of salmon colored uniform, so above the nurse image, create a new layer and set the mode to Multiply. You can start painting in the white uniform with some color with the Brush Tool.

You can use the Smudge Tool to smear away the cross sign on her stomach. Used the polygonal tool to select around the uniform only then Copy/Paste. This will allow us to do some effects exclusively to the uniform. Set this shirt layer to Linear Burn and fill to 50%. This will create a translucent layer with a more burnt effect. We will also add a grain.

Goto Filter>Texture>Grain and use the following settings.

Repeat the Filter on the background.

Here is an awesome grunge texture to dirty up the image in true Silent Hill fashion.

This is a screenshot of the current Layers panel. The grunge layer’s blending mode is set to “Overlay” and Fill is 50%. I also added a little bit of black shadow at the very top to finish the image.

Silent Hill nurse says, “Open up and say, Ahhh!!!”

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.