Another great tutorial for Photoshop CS3 powered by Edoardo Gioè.
After we saw how to use Clipping Mask of PhotoShop CS3, In this tutorial we will examine how to create interesting illustrations with the simple use of the pen and shape tools.
Remember to set your document in CMYK color mode if you wish to print it for use in magazines or advertising prints.
Once the document has been set up, we will start to draw some interesting shapes with the pen tool (press P on the keyboard) .
We will drag the shape’s anchor points until we are satisfied by the result.
In this example we will create a very simple wave like shape using only four anchor points.
Always remember that while working with vector shapes it’s usually best to use the least points possible to preserve the smoothness of the shape itself...
To make things a little bit more interesting, we will create a duplicate of the layer containing our wave (press CTRL+J on your keyboard) and, with our layer still selected in the layers panel, we will hit CTRL + T on the keyboard to bring up the free transform box.
We will then right-click in the free transform box and choose “Flip Vertical”.
We will then position our second shape above the first one and rotate it a little bit by using the Free Transform box again.
We will now use the Elipse tool (U on the keyboard if you have the elipse shape already selected in the toolbox) to draw a circle between the two waves.
Drag while holding shift to obtain a perfect circle. Once that is done, duplicate the layer (CTRL+J) and bring up the free transform tool by pressing CTRL+T.
Drag the corners of the box to the middle of the shape while holding down SHIFT and CTRL to maintain proportions and scale down the shape to the middle.
Change the color of this second circle so that it looks a little bit brighter than the original one.
Repeat this process by making progressively smaller and lighter colored circles until you obtain something you like.
That’s a rather interesting shape, isn’t it?
We will now create a group containing all that has been drawn until now in order to use it later.
In order to do this, select all layers (except the background layer) in the layers panel while holding SHIFT on your keyboard and then hit CTRL+G to create a new group.
We will call this group “WaveGroup”.
We will then create a duplicate of this group by right-clicking it in the layers panel and selecting “duplicate group”.
We will then de-activate the first group’s visibility by clicking on the small “eye” icon in the layers panel next to the original group.
We will then go back to the duplicated group to create a small sub-group containing just the concentric circles.
Duplicate this subgroup and position it between the wave shapes, but on the opposite side.
We will then resize this group by using the free transform tool (CTRL+T) to make the circles big enough to completely fill up the white space between the two wave-like shapes.
Once this image is obtained, we will duplicate the “WaveGroup” three times, moving and rotating each duplicate to create the following image:
At this point we will group everything that has been drawn and we will duplicate it.
Having selected the original group we will then hit CTRL+T and resize and rotate it to obtain the following illustration:
We will now select all layers except the background and hit CTRL+E on the keyboard to merge the layers.
This process will rasterize all vector images in your document and will allow us to apply styles to the entire illustration quickly.
I suggest you create a duplicate of all visible layers and groups and de-activate the visibility (by clicking on the eye icon next to the layers and groups) so we can always modify the shapes later. We will now add some styles to the layer containing the illustration by double-clicking on the layer to access the blending options.
We will add an outer-glow which will have the same color as our illustration’s base color with the following values: blend mode: normal, opacity: 30%, spread: 0%, size: 32px.
We will also add an white colored inner glow with the following values: blend mode: normal, opacity: 75%, spread: 0%, size: 10px.
This will soften the illustration and will make it blend better with the white background:
We have now created a very simple illustration with the use of just a few Photoshop tools.
We can now use this to do whatever we like best, like insert it into a photo or use it as a desktop backtround.
by Edoardo Gioè
16-05-08, 08:09
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