Hello, friends.

I’ve already prepared the canvas by downloading a jpeg of Chuck Norris to use as our base image. Let’s see, what kind of Photoshop image should we make with Mr. Chuck Norris here? First off, we put a little web friendly yellow into his eyes. We can use the magic wand to isolate all those little pixels that make up that gleam in his eye. And then we use the vector tool to create some piercing lasers emitting from his eyes. There we go. Happy little lasers. I think yellow lasers are precious. Usually people make them red or green, but we like to do things a little differently here on The Joy of Photoshopping. Look at those lovely little energy bolts.

You know what, maybe they need a friend…

So we’ll select the cloning replication stamp from our tool palette, and then recreate his left eye in the center of his forehead. Isn’t that majestic kids? And maybe that third eye is made out of a diamond. So we’ll get on Google and search for an image of a diamond. We want to pick one with good clarity and resolution.

We’ll drag that sparkly little jewel that is about to become Mr. Chuck Norris’s forehead eye onto our desktop and prepare to do a little digital surgery. What else do we need here?

I saw a show on the Discovery Channel about magical deep sea creatures the other week. Apparently there are very special beasts living beneath the sea that no one has ever seen before. I’m fascinated that there could be these breathtaking creatures just roaming our seas like that. So wild. So free. Like us, here, using Photoshop to do whatever we want. That’s why I love nature and Photoshop, they’re both so full of happy little surprises.

I don’t know why I brought that television program up, but maybe we’ll give Mr. Chuck Norris a tentacle for a nose in honor of those special sea beasts no one has ever seen before. Maybe there is even a creature down there that looks like Mr. Chuck Norris. Haha. Now I’m just getting silly. They’ll probably take this part out in the edit.

So now we open our RGB palette and pick a real deep, dark, tentacley green. We slowly build that tentacle out from Mr. Chuck Norris’s nose using his existing nose as a base. See how that’s starting to take shape? I can’t see Mr. Chuck Norris’s real nose anymore. We like to base all our photoshopping off of something real, or else your image will just end up looking like something from Candyland or Bizzaro World. We strive for an element of realism here at The Joy of Photoshopping.

We can’t totally cover up the precious photos we start with. We just want to add a little of our unique personality, to help these images go viral once we upload them to the net. Keep some reality in your fantasy. That’s what I believe. But hey, maybe you believe something totally different. There are no right answers in art or photoshopping. It’s all an individual expression, and what you feel like turning those happy little pixels into next.