Marlon Brando in the Godfather as Don Vito Corleone

Image Description

A portrait of the actor Marlon Brando. The Hollywood star is considered one of the best character actors in film history. Marlon Brando became world famous for his numerous classics. Among others he plays the head of the family Don Vito Corleone in the Mafia classic "The Godfather". For this role he got an Oscar. But already as a young man he became famous in "Endstation Sehnsucht" or in the history movie "Meuterei auf der Bounty". Wikipedia says about Marlon Brando: "With his roles in the films Endstation Sehnsucht (1951) and Die Faust im Nacken (1954) he gained worldwide attention for the acting technique of Method Acting. He had a lasting influence on the younger generation of actors both through his way of acting and his public appearance as a social outsider who was not interested in the rules of Hollywood. Source: Wikipedia/Marlon_Brando

The other masterpieces in which Brando participated include "Duell am Missouri" and the controversial anti-war film "Apocalypse Now". In "Don Juan deMarco" the old and meanwhile very fat Brando played a very impressive psychiatrist - by the way beside Faye Dunaway and Johnny Depp.

Marlon Brando influenced countless acting colleagues. The actor who most fervently emulated Brando's role model was James Dean. He made his film debut in a role for which Brando was originally intended: in ... "because they don't know what they're doing" - and just like young Brando, Dean impressed himself on the audience as an actor of brooding, rebellious, unarticulated young men. Richard Burton also studied Brando's acting style very carefully. At the beginning of his career Paul Newman had to fight against the stigma that he was just a copy of Marlon Brando. Jane Fonda, who met Brando during the shooting of Ein Mann wird gejagt, was deeply impressed by his combination of artistry and political commitment and felt he was the archetype of an artist engagé.

The portrait of Marlon Brando is digitally painted on the PC. At first a chiaroscuro sketch was used as background. The graphics program Photoshop offers a "softening filter". Afterwards the picture looked like this:

Photoshop Blur filter (Marlon Brando)

In the following several layers with light and dark lines were applied. In between, one layer was always painted over with semi-transparent color, so that the image did not slide into gray. After about 1.5 hours, the Marlon Brando portrait looked like this:

Underpinning the picture with light-dark modulation
Subtitling of the image with light-dark modulation

During the painting process a new layer was created for each color. For each layer the "transparency" (the alpha value) was set to less than 100 percent. This leads to the fact that you can always see all layers, even the first lowest one in the final image - at least theoretically. Of course the colors and contours combine to a realistic impression. Again half an hour later the picture looked like this - the face became more and more wrinkled, Marlon Brando is an old man:

Wrinkled face (by Marlon Brando)