As an image editor, you sometimes can’t wait to blend certain image with another one you find interesting to blend. One of the images that is interesting enough to blend is skull. With an appropriate blending, you can create a beautiful digital art with a skull image. But first, you need an appropriate image face as well.

To blend a skull image and a face image to result a partial skull face, you can use the layer mask feature which is provided by GIMP.

If you have no experience yet with image blending, this tutorial will show you how.

Preparation

Since we want to blend two images (skull and face), we definitely need those images first. So, prepare those two images before you get started.

Bonus: Most essential GIMP shortcuts

Getting started

• Launch GIMP and open the face image by going to File -> Open.

• Open the skull image by going to File -> Open as Layers. Now, you have two layers. You can also rename each layer if you want.

• Select the skull layer and lower its opacity to about 50. You need to do this to make it easy for you to scale the skull according to the object’s face on the face image.

• Use Scale Tool on the Toolbox panel to scale the skull image.

• Move the skull image to the face area of the face image using the Move Tool on the Toolbox panel.

• Scale again the skull image and set its position until it really merges with the object’s face. Once you are done with the skull size and position, return its opacity to 100 and move the layer down.

• Select the face image layer.

• Go Layer -> Mask -> Add Layer Mask. On the appearing pop-up dialog, select the White (full opacity) option.

• Go to the Toolbox panel and make sure that the foreground is black, while the background is white.

• Select the layer mask of the face image layer.

• Select the Paintbrush Tool on the Toolbox panel and set the brush type to Hardness 100.

• With the Paintbrush Tool selected, select the face area you want to delete.

• If you want to give some scratches on the face, you can change the brush type of the Paintbrush Tool to Texture Hose 02.

• Little tip, if you want to recover the area you have deleted, flip the foreground-background and select the area you want to recover.

• Once you are done with the selection, select the skull layer and go to Colors -> Curves to set the skull color. On the appearing pup-up menu, set the Channel until you get satisfied with skull color.

Once you get satisfied with skull color, you can export your image. Following is the example I created.

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