The Tutorial

how to make a picture of a blend between colorization and sparklization

Im going to go step by step to show how to make a picture that is really simple to make, and as a lot of areas to where you can play around, change and add to it, and has some really cool and easy to use effects

First Step(colorization)
First, find a picture that isn't too congested, as it makes it easier to see the final picture. After finding a picture and placing it into photoshop, click on the top bar and then in this order, Image>Adjustments>Threshold

Then it should pop up with a box, and a slider. The picture should become black and white, and the slider controls to what part of the picture is darker and which one is lighter, note that each picture reacts differently. Finally, find a spot in the slider that still shows the picture clearly, and until you are comfortable with it.

Second Step

Now, you want to create a new layer. Make sure to work on this new layer before doing anything or else it may mess up everything. The layer with the threshold effect, doesn't need to be touched again for this picture to work properly.

Now you will grab the paintbrush on the new layer, and pick any color you feel like. It will look messy at first, but feel free to paint over any portion of the picture with any color or multitude of colors you feel like. Any color you place on this layer, will end up only showing where the values of light and dark changed in the threshold window.

For example:

(this is just example purposes, not the exact colors, or order I used. Feel free 

to do whatever you want in this stage)

After painting all over your original portrait on a different layer, there should be a tab like button right above your layers pallette, that says Normal. click this, and find and use either "screen", "linear dodge", or "lighter color"
(the tab changing effect can also be found if you right click the layer, go into "blending options" and change the normal setting from there)

The result should look something like this:

My final picture ended up looking like this:

Third Step

So now you've gotten the colorization portion out of the way. Now its time to add some spunk to the picture.

I used some custom brushes found at "Brushlovers.com" to create the flame effect. All you need to do, is create a new layer and with the color of your choice, place a single brush near to the opening of the mouth, then hit "ctrl-T" to open the transform menu. With this you can manipulate the placed brush stroke to where you want it to be. I would recommend using the warp option by right mouse clicking on the square that appears when you press "ctrl-T"

Next, continue to repeat this process of placing a brush near the mouth and transforming/warping it to create a flame throwing effect. Make sure to start a new layer per each brush stroke.

It should look something like this:

Next, lets add some more brushes. Start another layer and in this one (I once again used brushlovers.com for this brush) place a brush that you can erase certain areas of it, to make it look as though its weaving in and out of the original picture.

Before

I've circled in Green the areas i erased in order to get the effect i wanted.

After

The End result should look something like this:

The changes are small, but if done repeatedly with different brushes and different sizes and perhaps different colors, you can get an amazing effect.

Feel free to mess around with this, and you can find that there is an unlimited amount of combinations that you can make with this! 

when you are done with adding paint brush layers, it could look something like this:

Fourth Step

Now, your picture is almost done! what I like to do is add a glow of some sort to some of the brushes I've added. to do this, you need to right click on the layer/ layers you want to add a glow too. 

(Note:if you want an easier way to make sure that the same glow is added onto multiple layers, merge them all together and THEN add the glow affect)

After right clicking, find "Blending options"  then click "outer glow"

A full color box should be defaultly selected, you can change the color of the glow by pressing the box.

Next, change the blend mode and color in any way you want to make the look you want your picture to have. From here, you can also change the amount of how much glow is visible or how far away it is from the original paint.

My picture ended up like this:

 There is a lot of room to play around when making something like this so feel free to play around and see what you come up with.

You could add in some backgrounds, more paint strokes, more glow effects, the possibilities are endless!

In the end you are left with a picture that although drastically different from the start, has had some major improvements to it! have fun!