Drawing Cute Smilies in Photoshop
By Dr Diablo | Photoshop CS3 | IntermediateIn this tutorial you are going to learn how to draw the body of cute gorgeous smilies with some lighting and shading on them. The tutorial will go through the processes of creating a similar smilie to the sample you see below and will unveil techniques to help you practice creating your own smilies with your own parameters.
Our tutorial will be divided into the following sections:
- Drawing the body outline
- Coloring the body
- Drawing the smilie expression
- Drawing the hands
Drawing the body outline
Start off by creating a new 15x15 document in Photoshop with the following parameters.
We are going to draw our smilie pixel by pixel. Grab the Pencil Tool from the Tool Panel on the left and start drawing pixels for the smilie's border as shown in the enlarged screenshot below. Notice that we have chosen two different colors to represent the highlights and shadows appearing on the border. The shadow color was selected as #809421 and the highlight color as #92A340. We will be calling this layer "Border" to be able to identify it later. Double Click on the layer's name in the Layers Panel to rename it to Border.
Filling the Body
Using the Elliptical Marquee Tool select the whole smilie along with the border. This step is going to give our selection faded edges to prevent fills from looking pixilated
It is time to fill the body of our smilie. We are going to fill the area we just selected with a couple of fill layers, each fill will have a different color. Start off by creating a new layer of our body color by going through Layer>New>Layer and name it Shadow. Now since the shadow color of our border is #809421, fill this selection by going through Edit>Fill while using the Color #809421.
Now that we have our first fill done, we are going to have to move the selection and fill it with another color. Use the Arrow Keys on your keyboard to nudge the selection one pixel to the right and another pixel to the top. The illustration below will show you how we're going to select out colors. The color we filled in the previous step is the one marked by the start point. The next colors which will be filled later individually after nudging the selection diagonally are marked by the black marks. You are free to choose how many colors you would like to add to your scale as long as you make sure there are no huge gaps between your choice of shades and make sure you finish at the end point and not somewhere in the middle.
(Is this the right position for the diagram below? We usually have the diagram BELOW its explanation, not before.)
So basically you are going to start by choosing the Start Point's color as indicated in the screenshot above, Fill the selection with it, Nudge the selection once to the top and once to the right and repeat the processes all over again six times by going through to the next color which is indicated by a black mark in the screenshot above. Here is how mine turned out after applying the process, I ended up using six shades of green.
That took care of the shadow of the smilie's body. To add the highlights, duplicate the Shadow layer by going through Layer>Duplicate Layer. We need to flip the newly acquired layer horizontally and vertically, go to Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontally and then Edit>Transform>Flip Vertically. Finally give it a blur by going to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur and apply a blur of 2 px.
Nudge the highlights a bit to the upper right using the Arrow Keys to get similar results to the screenshot below. Don't forget to clear the leftovers outside the border by selecting them with selection tools and pressing the Delete key to clear them.
Our smilie's body is complete. You can optionally add a slight gloss somewhere around the edge of the highlight area buy painting a light white stroke.
Drawing the Smilie's Expressions
This part of the tutorial depends completely on your creativity and knowledge of face expressions. I have chosen to draw using the Pencil Tool, single pixel eyes. When attempting to draw the eyes with one solid color, always make sure to chose the dark shade of your border, which in our example is #809421. I have also added 3 px wide cheek blushes with the color #F967B6.
Positioning and style take a major role in creating the expressions, so make sure you spend plenty of time experimenting with them.
Drawing the Hands
Finally, we are going to go through the process of creating a pair of hands for the smilie. Enlarge your canvas to make some space for the pair by going through Image>Canvas Size and setting the width to a value that matches your needs, I chose 30 px.
On a New Layer draw the hand on the left using the Pencil Tool as shown in the screenshot below. Notice how we drew the border of the hand using the same shading technique used in the smilie's body border while using the same colors for highlights and shadows.
The filling of the hand is also done using the same technique we used earlier to fill the body of the smilie.
Instead of going through the same process of making the other hand, simple go through Layer>Duplicate Layer, then go through Edit>Transform>Flip Horizontally. We have just duplicated the hand we created a second ago and horizontally mirrored it. Position the newly created hand on the other side to complete your smilie. Here is how my final product looks like.
This concludes our tutorial, you can always experiment with this technique by applying your own touch of style to it, and make sure you show off your work in the Graphics Showcase forum. I hope that you've learnt something new from it, feel free to email me on diablo@republicofcode.com for any comments or questions or alternatively post in the Oman3D Forum to get instant feedback.
- End of Tutorial.