In this tutorial, I'll show you how to take a stone statue and alter it to look life-like.
Before and After

We'll take this statue image:

And bring it to life like this:

Layering Skin Tones

Using the selection tool of your choice (I used lasso here), select the statue. I left the parts already colored yellow alone and selected the man.

When selected, click on the half black/half white circle at the bottom of the layers palette to create a hue/saturation adjustment layer. This will be the base color for our skin tone, so choose a fleshy tone in the yellow-orange range, with reduced saturation. Leave the lightness slider on zero.

Next, load the hue/saturation mask by holding ctrl while clicking on the hue/saturation mask. Create another adjustment layer, this time curves. Slide the curve upward to create a lightened effect – your curve may look different than this one, but the gist is to make the statue lighter while retaining some details in the shadows.

Load up the selection one more time and make a color balance adjustment layer. This will add some variations in the skin tones. Make the highlights and midtones more yellow/red and for shadows, make them more cyan and blue.

Coloring the Hair

Select the hair using the tool of your choice (again, I used lasso here). Create a hue/saturation layer for the base color of the hair. I chose blonde, so I made the hue a dark yellow and lowered the saturation a bit.

Load the hair mask and create a curves adjustment layer to darken the shadows and brighten the highlights (a simple “S” curve). This increases contrast in the hair.

Making the Skin Glow

Now to create the glowy skin tones. Create a new layer, set to overlay and draw in shades of pinks, yellows and oranges with a low opacity soft or air brush. Below is what the overlay layer would look like in normal view – it's quite light and subtle, but when set to overlay it makes the statue's body glisten.

Breaking through Stone

Now to create the cracked effect – as if the stone statue is coming to life. Load up the selection from our first set of masks (the body) and with the base layer active, hit “ctrl J” to copy just the body to a new layer. Move this layer to the top of the palette and click the button that looks like a grey square with a white circle at the bottom of the layers palette to create a mask. Fill this mask with black.

With a semi-hard round brush, paint with white in the areas that you want to remain looking like stone. Pay attention to perspectives and continuity. One little trick I used here – I knew the eyes wouldn't look particularly realistic painted, so I planned to mask them back in as stone.

Giving the Stone Depth

Give the stone mask layer a drop shadow. The defaults worked well for this image since it was rather small (around 500 – 600 px wide). Don't worry if it looks unrealistic, we'll fix that later.

While the drop shadow dialog is open, click on “bevel and emboss” and add some highlights