Creating Funny Big Head Characters in Photoshop

This tutorial is inspired by the Red Queen character in the new “Alice in the Wonderland” movie, where she has a big head and small body. We will be looking at using Liquify tool to achieve that sort of caricature effect.

Preview of Final Image

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Download “Two brides fight and shout at each other” from ShutterStock, or you may use other images of similar model poses.

Extract the bride on the right using the Layer Mask tool. There are various methods of extraction mentioned here so I will not go into details on how to crop out an object.

Cut out the bride’s head and paste into a separate layer. Hide the bride’s head for now. Go to Edit > Free Transform to resize the body smaller.

Unhide the bride’s head and position it roughly around the neck area like the example shown below.

Create a layer below the bride and give it a pink background. Change the opacity of the head layer to 50%. Overlap the head over the body as shown below.

Selecting the head’s layer, go to Filter > Liquify. Using the Forward Warp tool with settings shown in the screenshot, push the upper neck area on the head layer to meet lower neck on the body. You may need a few tries here to get a realistic blend. Use Eraser tool to touch up and remove the unwanted areas.

Repeat the same set of processes for the bride on left of the original stock image. So you will get two funny quarreling brides with big heads.

Download the “Castle and Park” from ShutterStock. Create a new document of size 1000×600 pixels. Place Castle image as a layer on the document with the two brides above it.

Select the Castle layer and enter Quick Mask Mode. Using the Radial Gradient tool with foreground color set as black and background as white, make a radial mask that starts around center of the document.

Exit Quick Mask Mode and you will get a circular selection. With that selection, go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. Fill in the settings shown below and hit OK.

Download “Just Married” from ShutterStock.

Extract the car out, reduce its size and place it on the pathway leading to the castle.

Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the Radius to 6 pixels and hit OK.

Create a new layer below the brides and car. Rename this new layer as “Shadows”. Using the Brush tool (Soft Rounded) with opacity 70% and size 60 pixels, paint some shadows below the brides and car.

Create a Hue/Saturation Adjustment layer above all layers. Check on colorize and key in the settings as shown in the screenshot below. Ok now group all these layers into one group folder. Rename this group folder as “Wedding Photo”.

Download “Blank Photo Frame on Old Wall” from ShutterStock.

Resize the “Wedding Photo” group and place it into the empty space within the photo frame.

Create a new layer above the “Wedding Photo” group and rename it as “Surface Glow”. Make a selection around the empty space within the photo frame and fill it with white.

Using the Eraser tool (Soft Rounded) with a large size around 500 pixels. Erase the left part of “Surface Glow” layer, leaving only some highlights on its right.

Download “Displeased Man in Studio” from ShutterStock.

Extract the man’s body like what I did below. Repeat the same for the head, so you will get them as two separate layers.

Combine both the man’s head and body with proportions as shown. Go to Edit > Free Transform to rotate the head slightly to the left.

Create a layer between the man’s head and body. Paint in shadows around the neck area. Repeat the same on a new layer below the body for some shadows around its border.