The Headless Doll Tutorial

Hello Friend,

Today, we'll be going through a pretty creepy tutorial in honor of Halloween being right around the corner. In this tutorial, we'll be creating our very own headless doll! Since this tutorial is more advanced, I will be moving a bit faster. If you're a beginner, you might want to warm up with some of our easy-to-intermediate tutorials before diving into this one. 

We will use stock images for the neckpiece and wig, then click the Quick Selection tool to select the head and hands for a new layer. Then we use the clone pattern tool to brush the head and hair out of the image, making them disappear, before repeating the process on our subject's upper body and hands.

Now things are getting spooky. We can bring out our upper mannequin half and blend it; it should look nice and smooth, and we can color the doll's skin a pale gray. I go into more detail about giving our mannequin a more ghostly look in my full tutorial available through the All-Access membership.

Next, we pull up the wig stock and use it to give her a more stylish yet scary hairstyle. Once we drag our photo in, we resize and warp the wig to make it look real and natural. I chose to give the hair a purple yet brunette glow, but I encourage you to have fun and play with the brush colors until you find something you like!

At this point, you guys should just be missing only the minor details to complete your creepy ghoul. So we're going to mask the fingers holding the head so they don't look too out of place. This part can get tricky, so it's available to members who'd like to access the full video tutorial.

I also added a shadow or blur to my head to make it look natural and creepy. Once we play with this effect and find the perfect hair and shadow effect, we're almost ready to show our scary creation!

To wrap things up, we're going to warm up the rest of our image and background to make her pale color POP! Finally, we're going to need to play around with the hue settings so the environment has a dark, bluish tone, creating the haunted look our image needs.

To make sure her eyes stand out against her dark eyelashes, we will make them nice and bright. That way, she has a haunting little girl cuteness to her, but she's a bit scary!

That's it! We've made our headless doll, and she is terrifying! If you'd like to follow along and see how I go through the process, you can access the full video tutorial available through the All-Access Membership.

Happy Editing!

Tara xo