Create a Lady Trapped in Spider Web Surreal Scene in Photoshop

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create a lady trapped in spider web surreal scene in Photoshop. We will be using lot of custom brush painting, layer blending and image adjustments along the way. Have a try!

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Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Grunge texture

Grunge brush set

Model by mjranum-stock

Hair brush set

Smoke brush set

Spider web brush set

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1000px* 1430px with black background. Un-zip the downloaded grunge texture and select the “05.jpg” file and load it into Photoshop:

Copy and paste the entire texture onto our document, re-size it to fit our canvas size:

Apply the following image adjustments to this grunge layer:

Black and White (set layer opacity to 70%)

Levels

Create a new layer on top and use the grunge brush set downloaded, paint some extra pattern over it:

Step 2

We will start working on the lady figure in this step. Load the model into Photoshop and cut out the model, paste it onto our document and use a soft eraser to remove/fade the edges as shown below:

Apply the following image adjustments as clipping masks to this layer figure layer:

Black and White

Levels

Optional: create a new layer on top of the previous 2 adjustment layers, use a crack brush and paint some crack onto the arms: (set layer blend mode to “overlay”)

Use the hair brush to paint some hair to the position shown below:

Use the smoke brush set downloaded, paint some black cloud around the model as shown below:

Also paint some white cloud around the bottom of the lady figure as shown below:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

Create a new layer below the layer figure layer, and use the spider brush downloaded, paint a spider web behind the model’s head:

Use a soft eraser to fade the edge of the web as shown below:

Step 4

We will wrap the lady’s arm with the spider web. We will use this brush (only available from Photoshop CS6 or above. If you don’t have this brush, use any hard brush as replacement):

Set the brush opacity to 30%:

Use this brush to paint lines across the arms:

Also paint some lines around the body:

Step 5

In this final step of the tutorial, we will work on some touch-ups and colouring of the image. We can flatten the image, duplicate the background layer and use the Smudge tool: