/Tutorials/ Produce a character in Photoshop
27/04/2007 | Filed under Design > Tutorials
Fancy creating a character from scratch, complete with different facial expressions, to use for rollover effects? Derek Lea takes you through the process in 19 steps
Knowledge needed: Basic Photoshop skills
Requires: Photoshop CS+
Project time: 20 minutes
Photoshop has a great set of basic shape tools. When you enable the Shape Layers option while working with these tools, you can create a series of solid-fill colour layers, masked by vectors. Basically, it’s a bunch of vector-based shapes on a series of layers. Vectors are superb, because they’re efficient in terms of memory and they’re always sharp, never suffering from the jaggies which often plague pixel-based images.
Shape layers and vectors are ideally suited to sharp and bold graphics, like the faces of cartoon characters. In the following tutorial, I’ll show you how to build a character from scratch. The beauty of working with shape layers is that you can duplicate and alter them, and this will allow you to create different facial expressions for your character.
But it doesn’t end there, because this is all perfect for web effects like rollovers. You can export different versions of your character into an application such as Dreamweaver, and create a rollover effect that changes the mood of your character instantly.
Click here to download this tutorial PDF.
Comments
Webstandard-Team / 23/05/2007 / 08:01 / http://webstandard.kulando.de
Nice Tutorial Derek, Thx!
Mathew Browne / 01/06/2007 / 18:16 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
Another great tutorial. Unfortunately I can't foresee myself getting to use it anytime soon, but a fun exercise all the same. Thanks!
wayne / 25/06/2007 / 09:52 / http://gallery.k-netsystems.net
Good tutorial. But for me..it's just to hard.
Adrian / 03/10/2007 / 05:13 / http://www.pctd.co.uk
Hey thanks - I been looking for a tut just like this to help me with a swf project i been working on.
Tom / 22/11/2007 / 10:53 / http://www.visarts.de
Nice tutorial. But for me Illustrator CS is much better for such vector shaped work! And the best thing is you can still export it into Flash or other vector based format.
