Want some faves? Read along...

_{Model: =thegreenmanalishi - Texture by: `Princess-of-Shadows}

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So you're looking for faves and no matter what you do, your photos/photomanips/whatever get like 3 comments and 7 faves in a fortnight. Too bad, huh? Specially when you look around and you see photos exactly like yours (if not worse, admit it: you're way cooler than those ever-so-popular deviants who get sacks of undeserved attention) getting like 7,147 faves in the 43 seconds immediately following the upload.

This is nagging you. I know it is. It's nagging you like the poke emote. I know it is, admit it. Don't be shy: you've even begun to question yourself and your aesthetics, your heritage, your artistic DNA, I know it. You bought a cool digital reflex thinking that your old Nikon Coolpix was the problem, but nothing changed.

It's nagging you. I know it is.

Don't fret. Don't worry. I have the solution. Come and rest your head on my shoulder, O Unknown Underfaved Deviant, and I'll whisper the cure into your ear.

Bear with me a tad longer, please. This is one of the best Fav Recipes around.

Ready? Write down. Take notes.



Ingredients:

A girl, possibly a friend, or a sister, or a cousin when in lack of a lover. It doesn't matter, as long as she's willing to show her legs and her underwear.

A vynyl record. Any vynyl record would do. Ask your father, go treasure-hunting in your mother's wooden chest up there in the attic. Which record? It doesn't matter at all: you don't need to have a great one (i.e., a true vintage Rolling Stone limited bootleg edition), you only need the vynyl itself.

A pair of Converse All Stars. Old and battered, if possible. If she doesn't have one pair, try not to find them too large for your friend/cousin/sister/whatever's feet, otherwise you'll venture in the treacherous Riskofgrotesqueland.

Striped socks. You don't have them? Neither your girl friend/cousin/sister? C'mon, don't be Uncle Scrooge MacDuck-ish, go out and buy a pair.

A vintage/grunge texture. On DA there are kazillions of them, and they're there just for this purpose, so don't fret. Do a search typing "grunge texture" in the box: it's as simple as that. Just remember to give proper credit to the deviant who took the time to prepare them in order to allow you getting a bunch of favs.

Proceedings:

Take the girl friend/cousin/sister and make her stand against a wall (better if a brick one) or a door (better if a wooden one) or a room wall (better if it has some old-granny-looking wallpaper on it).

Make her wear the striped socks and put the Converse All Stars somewhere near her feet. Do the same for the vynyl record, putting it in her immediate whereabouts. Then convince her to show her panties (mandatory: if shown, the underwear has to be white cotton: any other kind won't do).

[Lots of variations are possible within this theme: 1) Striped socks just jutting out the Converses' top border if the shoes are on; 2) The vynyl record lying on the floor or against the door/wall; 3) The vynyl record held by the girl friend/cousin/sister to cover exactly her panties; 4) The Converses left abandoned near the striped-socked feet; 5) I could go on until Suggestion #717...]

Take your fancy new digital reflex and frame the shot showing just her legs. The feet have to be close together, to convey a feeling of vulnerability and innocence. (Slightly inward feet/legs: yes. Open and distanced feet: no-no.) Make sure to have some nice anisotropic highlights on the record grooves (ok, the wording is too complicated? Be sure to flash the album).

After the usual things (downloading the photos etc etc), open your old trusty Photoshop (or Gimp or whatever) and apply the vintage/grunge texture on top of the photo itself. If necessary, adjust the size of the new layer to fit the frame. Choose "multiply" or, if you prefer the look, "screen" or "add" and adjust the opacity of the grunge layer accordingly.

Apply a black-and-white filter on the whole image (in Photoshop is Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Black and White) and tick the "tint" checkbox. A split-second later, voilà you have sepia, and sepia is cool. We all know that.

Tinker a bit with the settings, but don't you ever, evah!, forget your final goal: your deviation absolutely has to look like it's a photo that's been held for years in a wallet, cherished and caressed and dreamed upon. Like it's a photo of Marguerite Rebecca Thackeray de Havilland, a romantic, lost love of thirtysome years ago, and not a photo of your cousin Wilma taken twenty minutes before. (Now you'd think, hey, the Converses have nothing to do with that! Exactly. This is the magic. We're talking about Faves Hunting here, not Artistic Accuracy.)

Duplicate the original photo layer and do a bit of a Gaussian Blur on it. Then go to Layer -> Layer Mask -> Reveal All and paint out some of the blur. Use the black brush at 50% opacity to remove a bit of the blur where the supposed, fictional fingers of the sad lover are less likely to have been in the long years of longing and melancholic remembrance (in other words, the photo should look ruined - read: grunge texture - more on the borders).

You're over. Now choose a thoughtful, sad, emo title. Like, in the case of this specific deviation hereabove, something in the realm of "The Girl on the Door" or "You Sang to me that Last Song". Don't title it like I did, otherwise your maneuvers will be discovered and you can say goodbye to all the faves you were hoping for. Then, of course, OF COURSE!, upload your photo in the Photography -> Conceptual gallery. Don't you ever think for an instant to put it somewhere else! Choosing another category is a big no-no. Remember it: it has to be conceptual. Any other gallery won't do, and all your efforts will be wasted.

Here you go. Upload and wait. The faves will come: maybe not in the thousands, but you'll see a big improvement on your gallery's average. Trust me.

















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_Haha.






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