Establishing a revered and unmistakeable style is a paramount measure of success for any artist. Canadian photographer and retoucher, Kelly Robitaille has accomplished this feat with her celebrated Whimsical Waif Portraits. On the surface Kelly's work is dark, surreal, and full of emotion, but it's more than big eyes and dark imagery that have provided Kelly such artistic success.

In this tutorial Kelly Robitaille unveils her entire creative workflow for taking surreal and whimsical portraits from concept to realization. Beginning with a concept, Kelly stresses the importance of giving her subjects backstory to create a narrative and enhance character-driven emotion within her images. She then dives into the technical side of her work demonstrating a number of Photoshop tools in interesting and unconventional ways specific to her style, yet easily translated into nearly any style or genre. Using common Photoshop practices like dodge and burn, frequency separation, compositing, blend modes, the liquify tool, and puppet warp, Kelly's workflow provides a fresh look at retouching as an artful practice more than a trite and repetitive process. Kelly teaches how to manipulate human form with purpose, invoke emotion with characters, and use textures to create depth and atmosphere within images. Finally Kelly challenges you with a homework assignment, providing a RAW image and character story to create an image of your own.