Centaurs.

Finished Result:

1) You need to find some suitable pictures, if you wanna sharpen your teeth a little first use these images: woman1.jpg and horse1.jpg, these are the images to make the above centaur.Once you've found suitable pictures (eg the body looks like it could fit on the horse, lighting, posture etc, of course you CAN cheat a little, the picture of the woman I mirrored straight away so that the light would be shining in the proper direction) we can start.

2) Cut the human in half, and cut the horse's head off.

3) You need to decide whether you will put a background on the finished result (if so what colour will it be?) in this case the background is just gonna be plain black so select black as your foreground colour and start cutting out the two pictures. You HAVE to be brutal, with photos the foreground is tightly interwoven with the background so you need to clip away at it so it still looks relatively real. Remember you pictures will look very pixelated to begin with, don't worry, we'll get rid of that later.

4) Now both pictures are cut out we need to stick them together. With the horse cut out, enlarge the canvas so you have some more space around the (missing) head area.

5) Copy the human cut out (shes been mirrored to fit the horse), and paste it into the horse cut out. Don't be quick at this point, take out several minutes to decide where the body looks best on the horse body. When you are happy with it right click to deselect.

6) If you are going to put a background in, now is the time to do it. With the BG of your choice, select Fill: Pattern: *whatever the BG pictre is called* and fill it in on your rough cut of a centaur.

7) At the moment your centaur probably does't look too good. Pixelated, jaggy. Well select the smudge tool and at a low setting at first (eg Opacity: 20 Density: 100 Paper texture: none Size: 4 ) go around the edges of your centaur just to blend it in with the background.

8) The middle part of the centaur probably still looks a little crappie, so with the smudge tool again (higher setting, eg, Opacity: 60) drag the flesh of the woman into the fur of the horse and vice versa.

9) With the smudge tool at Opacity: 100 make the curve of the woman's belly to the horse's chest a nice gentle natural curve.

10) With this centaur she looks a little funny with a brazier (for male centaurs these few steps are irrelevent) So to give our centaur a more Grecian feel I found some pictures of Xena Warrior Princess and cut out her Bra thingy and the bangle on her arm.

11) Again be brutal with your cutting out and use a flesh tone so that when you put them on your 'taur it will blend better.

12) Place the metal brazier on top of our centaur's one and with the soften tool just blend it in a little (you may need to rotate the metal bra to make her boobs look more even, remember to sharpen after rotating).

13) Same process as Step 12) but with the bangle.

14) Done!

Variations:

Play around with your centaur, put it through some of the filter factories and see the weird and wonderful stuff that comes out (Factory M: Biohazard is always a good one)

See all the centaurs I've made here.