27 - Curiosittty

Haseeb Sumra, or “Curiosittty” is a 19 year old freelancer artist from Pakistan. He started getting into YouTube in early 2022, where he made his YouTube channel and after later selling it in 2023, got into thumbnail design.

Since then, Curiosittty has worked on hundreds of thumbnails for mainly faceless creators and agencies. Though some big names may include Dodford, golfcartmedia, Megalomedia, Shaul, and Dr. Karan.

Twitter (X) → x.com/MrCuriosittty
Discord → @Curiosittty

This thumbnail was one of the many thumbnails I did for the channel “Maximind”. The channel is run by a faceless creator who owns a lot of other channels.

The video is about the Mandela effect, where a large group of people have memories of things that never happened, creating a false shared memory. Mostly misremembering a detail about some event, or from pop fiction.

The client provided me with the rough script for the video, which is what I usually take from my clients. It's easier for me to get into the mind of the script writer. I find it really cool, helps me get in the vibe, you know.

The main inspiration was from the movie The Substance (2024). It’s a unique kinda body horror, and the main visual for the thumbnail was really from the last scenes. Watch the movie, you’ll get it. Great movie too.

After that first connection, I went to Pinterest, my go-to for inspo. I knew I wanted to do a stretchy-warpy effect, so here’s what I collected.

This was the image I generated, with Nano Banana on Freepik AI. It wasn't really hard, I wanted a generic regular guy, I got this the first try basically and I was pretty good with it.

This was the initial sketch I sent the client, got approved, and I got to work. The colours I was initially thinking of were purple, toxic green or red. Went with red, as it showed urgency, you know that feeling of realization, that feeling of when everything comes down falling, when you realize the memories were all fake, you’re questioning yourself and whatnot. I wanted to tap into that.

Purple and green to me were more towards a feeling of nausea, and confusion and being high, so yeah, that’s just why I didn’t go with those.

I’m a big fan of colour and saturation contrast. I want the subject to have more colour than the background. I think it’s better as compared to having different colours of the same saturation. So going, I knew I was going to do that.

First things first, I put the subjects in the frame.

Then I removed the eyes, and used Liquify to get that stretch, and then masked out half of it so it connects nicely.

The colour was the main thing about the thumbnail and I didn’t really wanna use the good ol’ hue/sat adjustment layer and colorize it red, or use the gradient map method. For this, I used around 4 selective colour layers, I think it’s better, it gives much more control over the colours, individually, and boy did it work. I was able to colour the nose area more on the orange side and the red more on the pink-ish side, I think it looks more deep, more absorbed and just overall more beautiful.

Now was the time for details, I whitening the teeth and the eyes, getting that sweet sweet contrast. And I used two curve layers to emphasize the structure a little more, the stretch, the face, all that.

Then to make the smooth not so smooth and jelly-like and rather painful, I added veins. The texture I made myself in Photoshop, quite a handy thing. It goes Filter > Render > Clouds and then Filter > Render > Difference Clouds, and then add a contrast/brightness layer, adjust that, colourize, and BOOM, instant veins texture.

Then I did the background, it was just some straight lines, added a filter to make them in a circle, and then some to make them zig-zag, and some radial blur to get that feeling of speed. Also threw in one of those anime speed lines you see in the manga and stuff.

Finishing off, I added a grunge and fabric texture I got from TextureLabs.org, and added a camera raw filter, bringing out the highlights, and this was the final.

I also did this variation. This was done by the plugin DitherTone Pro in Photoshop. Could be done by any dithering app, and a bunch of effects on Photoshop.

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