How I Make Chocolate

Like anything, there are plenty of different ways to go about creating chocolate.
But for those of you who are like me, and just don't have the time to harvest cacao seeds in this day and age, I'm going to show how we can create everyone's favorite food right here in Phoenix.
The techniques I use in this image can be applied to many different types of images that involve melting, or general liquifying and smudging.

The first step is to find a source image.
Doing a quick search for statues, I came across this wonderful image of the mythological, Artemis, who'll be our lucky chocolate covered victim today.

Although, realistically, any image would work, I prefer sticking to images like these with very well defined ridges with stong contrasting lights and shadows.
They'll make for a more interesting picture in the long run.

1. The first thing I do is desaturate the entire statue, and smooth out any glaring dirty or rough areas with either the blur tool or smudge.

2. The second step is really your call. Some would prefer to color the statue at this point. It really doesn't make a huge difference.
But I really can't wait to get to the fun part, the smudging. So I do that step here.
I look for any protruding areas first, such as the nose and chin, and lay down my thickest drips here, using the Liquify Tool set at 4/10 power.
Then, still with the liquify tool, using miniscule circular motions towards the base of the drip to create our blob-like ends.

We continue to do that throughout our entire image, creating drips in and around the ridges of the figure.
Note, be aware of the contours of your figure, and smudge your drips so that they flow accordingly.

And after we're done that, you should be left with something like this.

I swear, it's easy to get carried away in this stage once you get into the dripping groove, so make sure to step back every so often to make sure you're not going overboard with the drips, or risk completely losing any sense of realism.

3. Since grey chocolate is not on anyone's list of favorite confectionaries, let's give her some color now.
Using the Brush tool set to a dark brown tone, I painted over the entire figure on a new layer, then set this layer to "Hard Light"

Remember, you don't need to get the color perfectly on the first shot. You can always go ahead and adjust the hue and saturation levels once the figure is covered and you can see exactly how the Hard Light blend mode affects your image.

4. Now she's starting to look a little tasty. But let's make her more shiny.
I do this first by using a white Brush Tool and painting over key areas lightly. Following the general highlighted area of the original lighting, all we're doing here is enhancing what's already there.
I then set this layer to "Overlay".

Then using a black brush, I did the exact opposite and painted in the shadowed areas to enhance the contrast of the image overall.

Then lowered the opacity as I saw fit.

5. At this point, our chocolate friend is just about finished. But a few finishing touches can help give it that extra pop.
I did this simply by taking a white brush again, but this time set to 100% opacity and painted in small overblown highlighted spots in the middle of key highlighted areas.

And voila, dessert is served.

A quick and easy way for you to to create chocolate, while your friends are still busy grinding away at their cacao nibs.

Artemis statue from www.istockphoto.com
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=165377