Digital Surrealism-Glorified bodies

So for our culminating assignment, we had to make a surreal image using photos, and (obviously) photoshop. My work is called; "Glorified bodies"

We had to make it based on social, economical, or humanity issues. So I chose to do a subject that is looked at quite often; how industries make models on magazines look like the perfect human being, hence why my picture is called “Glorified bodies”. I took a picture of my friend holding up her shirt to reveal her stomach, while another two friends of mine are working on her, to make her body look “perfect”. There is a screen to the far right, which shows what they are doing to her, pushing her stomach in, retouching her face, etc. At the current moment in the picture they were just fixing up her stomach to make her look pencil skinny.

Oh gosh…the procedure was forever. I had a lot of trouble actually working on the model on the screen to make her look like an actual magazine model, it got really aggravating after a while, also, my model had a slight smirk on her face when we took the picture, so I had to make it look like she actually had a frown. I used probably 30-ish layers to make this, maybe more, but eventually I managed to get it to work, I adjusted lighting in the picture, colored things over, etc, and it ended with this.

What I learned was that being someone who actually edits the model must be pretty dang hard. It was really difficult to edit my model to make her look like a magazine model. That, and I’m pretty good at coloring things over J. I also learned that the liqufy tool is more useful than I thought. And in the end…I’m actually