So today I’m going to show the basic steps on How to create a “James Cameron Avatar” or a “na’vi avatar” as its commonly know as on the web.

These are just going to be the basic steps and not the complete tutorial – Cos I think each picture will have its own individual tweaking to work on . And that will also leave open a scope for improvement in this tutorial !!!

The Finished Pics :

So First in Photoshop open your Pic and with the lasso or pen tool select the skin area’s and then open -> Hue and Saturation . -> Turn the Hue all the way upto +180 and click OK

Select the Lips and the Lower Nose area with the lasso or Pen tool -> Copy and paste the selection on a new layer -> open Hue and Saturation and turn the Hue to +100 ( or whatever shade of pink U’d prefer ) -> Reduce the opacity to 50 ( or less till you get a good blend with the purple ).

Then for the eyes Go to filter -> Liquify . Select the Bloat Tool and use it on the eyes ( click around 2-3 times on center of the eye ) .

If  you want to use the proper Avatar eyes you can cut out the eyes from your pic and use these Avatar eyes .

For the skin . download a zebra texture and with the liquify tool adjust it like I have and then Transform -> Flip Horizontal .  ( you can right click and copy the below image ) .

set the texture over the face and change the Blend mode to Soft light . Reduce the opacity ( according to your pic ) . With the Eraser – remove the unwanted part out side the face . Do the same for other parts of the skin.

On a New layer draw some small dots like the “Avatar freckles ” . I used the color #d1dfea . and then On the Layer Style -> select Outer Glow and set the below parameters .

So that’s a Basic Avatar here and feel free to play around and add improvements . I later added the ears from the Below Pic .