SugarSkull / Day of the Dead

 

This tutorial was written by Mizteeque on 16th September 2025, and assumes a working knowledge of psp.

Any similarity to other works is unintentional and purely coincidental.

Supplies Needed:  

3 tubes of your choice

I am using 3 of my own AI tubes, which can be downloaded 

from my AI blog HERE

font of choice

a few brushes of choice

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Open blank canvas 750 x 250

c/p 3 tubes of choice

resize if necessary, but we want them fairly large to cover the canvas, 

position them left, right and middle to your liking.  

Don't worry if your middle tube is covering the side tubes, 

we are going to sort that out in a bit.

copy merged, hide the 3 tubes for now

paste as new layer

duplicate twice, mirror and flip one of the duplicates
merge the 2 duplicated together
adjust - blur - motion blur angle 90, strength 100
repeat twice

unhide the 3 tube layers

make the left tube active

change blend mode to screen, lower opacity to 62

duplicate blur - gaussian blur 16 - lower opacity to 54

repeat this for the right tube

now make middle tube active

change blend mode to hard light
use your eraser set to a nice grunge brush
and gently erase each side of the middle tube 

to uncover the left and right tubes a little

(now I found my middle tube was a bit too see through around the chin area so I did this)
duplicate and erase the top half of the tube
change blend mode back to normal.

Merge visible

select tool - custom selection - left 0, top 50, right 750, bottom 100
promote selection to layer
deselect

change blend mode to screen
effects - penta.com - jeans
amount 43, width 8

add some nice brushes on a new layer if you wish

finally new raster layer
floodfill with a color that matches your tag
select all, contract 2, delete
deselect

add your name, license and copyright information
merge all
save as jpg

To make the avatar

selection tool - custome selection

top and left 0, right and bottom 200

selections edit selection, move to a place of your liking

edit selection, copy merged

deselect

Paste as new image

selection tool  - rounded rectangle

draw out the selection almost as big as the canvas

invert

delete

invert

expand by 3

new raster layer

floodfill with color of choice

deselect

move this layer down 

Add you name

Merge visible

save as png