Fantasy Portrait

Note that I usually don't give you exact color coordinates. This is because I want you to be thinking as a Photoshop designer and it also helps develop your eye if you want to go exactly off of me (hehe). Remember you can open a document in Photoshop and use the eyedropper tool in the color chooser for your gradient stops to get the exact color your looking for from any open document in the workspace.  After you have chosen your color stops to look something like this (4-5 of them in slightly different light purple shades) name your gradient and click New.

Now go ahead and swipe at an angle across the background layer.

Now that you've created the nice pink gradient and swiped it at a diagonal on your background layer; go ahead and get your main character. This is going to be a nice portrait design and the better the quality of your original source images = the much better end quality potential of the design.

On the source image document you'll need to get a selection of your star character. You can use many methods within Photoshop. Here I'm using the magic wand ('W') on a medium tolerance of 20. This will select the background maroon pixels.

Now you can right click and choose select inverse to close in on the desired image. The art of the selection is a worthy endeavor because I myself an still striving to perfect it.  It really depends on what situation you are in because there are a multitude of tools that you can use to get a perfect selection. These are covered in the Basic Photoshop training program from BasicPhotoshop.com