'Maya'

If you’re upfront about “cheating”, then it's not really cheating, is it? I wanted an illustration completed in a limited amount of time, not a turntable or an animation, so I used a few tricks to maximize the impact of the image:

I painted the texture directly on the hat and bandanna, very much like projection painting or matte painting. I cut out some of the fins, placed them in front, placed them behind, and ran a blur on them to create the depth of field. This way the character looks like he has a body, just not a floating head; it's much more believable like this (Fig.15).

I ran a Noise filter on the image to make it look like an old photograph, and to finish off, I color corrected the image to get the tone and mood I wanted, and there I had myself the Pirates Hype illustration – my fun, little project!