Create a Mandala in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Create Mandala Art in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for Lunch class, create a Mandala in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at how to create Mandala art by rotating shapes in Photoshop. You will learn how to make a template for your art and then how you can use it to design your own Mandala. As you're watching these videos, you will see a prompt that lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words, why you're enjoying this class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. If you're ready now, let's get started creating Mandala art in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - Set up your document: The first thing we're going to do is to create a new document, so I will choose File and New. I'm going make mine relatively small. So mine system 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels in size. It has a transparent background and I'm working in RGB color. I'll click "OK." I'm going to mark out some guides which might be useful as I work, so I'll choose View and then New Guide. I'm going make one at 50 percent, so I'm just going type 50 percent horizontal and a second at 50 percent vertical. I'm going to make a circle so that I can say roughly where I want my mandela to go. For this, I'm going to use the Elliptical Marquee Tool, and I'm going to start drawing pretty close to the top left corner of this document. I'm just going to drag out an Elliptical Marquee, but I'm going to hold the Shift key as I do so that this shape is going to be a perfect circle and I'll just let go once I pretty near filled my document, I'll press the letter D to get back to my default colors. Since white is my background color, I can press control backspace, that would be Command delete on the Mac to fill this shape with white. Now, there's no guarantee that this shape is in the middle of the document and chances are it won't be. There are a few ways that you can center it, but I'm going to show you one that is a little bit unusual but will allow you to center anything in any document. anytime. I have this shape selected, you can see the marching ants around the edge of it. I'm going to press Control or Command A to actually select the entire document area. Now I'm going to Layer, Align Layers to Selection and I'll choose Vertical Centers and then go back and do Align Layers to Selection, Horizontal Centers. Now this shape is perfectly centered in my document. Now I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now, one of the things that is really handy with this mandela's is having an idea as to how big a slice you're going to be working in. I'm going make a mandela that has six elements around that, so I'm going to click here to make a new layer. I'm going to a tool that you'll probably very seldom ever use but we're just going to be really handy here. It's a Single Row Marquee Tool, so I'm going to select it and then just click on the edge of this document. Photoshop creates a rectangular marquee that is just one pixel deep. Black is my foreground color, I'll press alt backspace, that would be option delete on the Mac to fill that with black. Now I want to go and place it in the center of the document or I can do the same thing as I did before because this may be quite difficult to position any other way. Since it is selected, I will press Control or Command A. Then I'm just going to choose Layer, Align Layers to Selection and I want Vertical Centers. That's all I need to do to move that one pixel rectangle over the guideline here. It's a little hard to see because the guides are visible, but I can choose View and then Show and disable Guides just for the moment and you can see that line is across the document. To mark out the slices for our mandela, I'm going to take this layer and drop it onto the new layer icon. I've got two versions of this single pixel line. I'm going to choose Edit, Free Transform. Then I'm going to go to the angle up here and I'm just going to type 60 in because I need six slices around my mandela, each one of those is going to be a 60 degree rotation, and I'll click the check mark. Now I can use a keystroke that we're going to use throughout this lesson, and that is control, alt, shift and T command option Shift T on the Mac to rotate this around. I'll click away and deselect my selection by pressing Control or Command D. Now I can go and select these two layers which contain these sets of lines and press Control or Command E to merge them into a single layer. This gives us an idea of where our mandela is going to be, so we will be designing inside these areas here. You can lock this down if you wish by just selecting the Layers and just click the lock icon because you don't want it to go anywhere, but you do want it to be visible there so that you can design your mandela within this area. 3. Pt 2 - Create the Mandala: Now we're into the fun part of actually creating the mandala itself. I'm going to add a new layer here. I'm going to start with a couple of circles. Now, you can do the circles. If you're working in a later version of Photoshop, you can do it with the ellipse tool, or you could go ahead and use the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm going to do one of each, just so that you can see, depending on your version of Photoshop, how you're going to do it. I'm going to start with, say, a six and later with the ellipse tool. I'm going to hold Shift as I drag out a circle, hold down the Space bar so I can position it. I want it in the center of this document, but I can center it up in just a minute. I'm going to Properties panel here and I'm going to set the fill to no fill at all and I'm going to set the stroke to black. At this stage I want to determine roughly how thick I want my lines to be. Now, I need to cover a fair bit of territory pretty fast for you here today so I'm going to use fairly thick lines. I'm going to use a 13 pixel line. If you want a finer mandala, you could choose a finer line. Let's go to the Layers palette we've got ellipse here, so I've got it selected. I can press Ctrl or Command A to select the entire document. This time you can say that I've got my alignment tools here up on the tool options bar. So I can click align vertical centers and line horizontal centers and that circle is now aligned perfectly inside that document. Let's go and say how are you going to do this if you're using an earlier version of Photoshop, again, a new layer. I'm going to draw out a circle using the Elliptical Marquee tool. I'm just going to deselect the selection I have at the moment and just draw out my circle. I'm just using the Spacebar so I can position it roughly where I want it to be. To stroke this selection, I'll choose Edit, Stroke, 13 pixel, stroke black, color. Click "Okay". Now of course, I want to make sure that this is centered. It's already selected, so I'll press Ctrl or Command I. If I don't see the alignment options appearing here, then layer align layers to selection vertical centers, and layer align layers to selection horizontal centers will just ensure that these are perfectly centered inside the document. I'll press Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. Now I'm going to add another layer. I'm going to make a leaf shape, and for this I'm going to use the pen tool. Now, even if you're really nervous about using the pen tool, it's pretty easy. So let's see how we're going to do that. We're going to use these guides as an indication as to what one-sixth of our mandala is going to look like. So I'm going to start about here, which is at the intersection of two pieces of my mandala. I'm going to head up basically along the line, the guideline that I have there. I'm going to about the middle here. It doesn't have to be the middle because this can be a less than perfect mandala. I'm going to click and drag upwards. As I still have my left mouse button pressed down, I'm going to hold the Alt or option case. I can swing this handle around so I can head back in the direction I came in. I'll let go the left mouse button before I let go the Alt or Option key, and I'm going down here and click and drag to just finish the end of my leg shape. Then I'll just press the "Escape" button to just escape out of here. If you want to work on your path, you can go to the direct selection tool, It's so quiet arrow tool. Then you can go and just adjust this path as you wish to perfect it, if you want it to be perfectly symmetrical, but I don't actually want mine to be perfectly symmetrical so the best thing to do is if you're aiming for not perfectly symmetrical, make it obviously not perfectly symmetrical. So actually bent out of shape a little bit. It's obvious to somebody that you weren't aiming for perfection and missed, but you actually deliberately meant for this to be imperfect. I now have a path. Well, I want to turn it into a selection so I can stroke it. Here's the parse palette. I'm going to click here to turn my path into a stroke. Now, I think I've got an extra bit on the end of my parse. I'm just go zoom in here and just, I do think that I've ended up because I'm looking at this here. It doesn't look like the leaf shaped. I think I've ended up with something here I didn't want. So I'm going to append tool with the delete anchor point tool. I'm just going to click on what I think was a wrong anchor point, which was so. It's all gone now. With my parse selected, I'm going to click here on load path as selection. So this is now a selection and we can go and stroke at exactly the same way as we stroked our circles with edit stroke. Same 13 pixels stroke black color, click "Okay". Let's go to the last palette. This is now I raster layer. It's just a set of pixels on this last, so I'm going to press Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection. I'm going in with the eraser and it looks like I've got a circular hard arrays or which would be really good choice here, and I'm just going to erase on this top-most layer the bits that I don't want for this leaf. I've now got a leaf shape that I can use. I'm going to take this layer, drag and drop it onto the new layer icon so I have a second leaf shape. I'm going to the Move tool, I'm going to choose Edit, Free Transform. There's a little mark right in the middle of this square, and that is its rotation points. I'm going to pick its rotation point up and drop it down here at the intersection of all of these lines. What I'm looking for is position 500, 500 with the x and y. Now, you can play around here as long as you like, and I guarantee you're not going to get 500 and 500 exactly. So don't even bother, just drop it somewhere close to that and go up here and just type in 500, 500 because it just doesn't seem to snap, even if you wanted to snap. Then you're going to type in here 60 degrees because that's our rotation and do a visual check, make sure that this thing is rotated where you thought it was going to and then click the check mark. Now we're going to use that same key stroke we used earlier, Ctrl Alt Shift T, Command Option Shift T on the Mac, and just rotate the leaf around. Now we've got a whole lot of leaves here. So what we're going to do is we're going to and select the topmost one, the layer that has it on, Shift click on the last one, right-click and choose Merge Layers or you could just press Ctrl or Command E. That will just merge those layers together, and then Ctrl or Command D to deselect the selection if your selection is still there. I'm going to add a new layer to just pop it on the top here, and then I'm going to add a different element in, and this time I'm going to add an element between these two shapes. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm just going for a half circle here. I'm going to the Elliptical Marquee Tool, going to drag out an ellipse here. I'm going to stroke at while I'm here because I'm on a brand new layer and can easily delete it if I don't like what I get. Let's just stroke it. Now, at this point you'll want to click away from the shape, deselect it, and then click back on it because otherwise you won't be able to rotate it as a single shape, it's going to break up. I'm just going to rotate this round and I'm just going to check on the rotation here and just make sure it's a 30 degree rotation because that's going to create a even shape here, and place it in position over the line here. I can decide which, if any, of this I'm going to erase. Now, I think I'm going to erase these bits in the middle here. Again, this is a regular bitmap layer. If it was a shape layer, you can just right-click and choose Rasterize Layer to rasterize it. I'm going to erase the bits that I don't want here, and then go on to get the move tool. I'm going to duplicate this layer, just drag and drop it onto the new layer icon. I'm going to move this top version, so I'm going for that little indicator in the middle. I'm going to drag it down somewhere near 500, 500 and then put in here 500, 500. Now, you might be wondering why I don't immediately come up here and type in 500, 500, but you going to get that little thing moving to start off with or it's just not going to work. The thing that you're going to be changing, the position of won't be the thing that you think you're changing the position of. Then Ctrl Alt Shift T on the PC Command, Option Shift on the Mac, Ctrl 0, just to zoom back out and I'm going to select my layers that contain all the shapes, right-click and merge them. 4. Pt 3 - Complete the mandala: Now, I'm going to go ahead and add the extra details to this mandala. If you don't want to watch me do that, go ahead to the next video. But I sometimes feel disappointed myself when somebody shows this much of a mandala and then goes and show us a finished product, and you have a [inaudible] to the little bits in-betweens. So I'm going to speed this video up. if you want to watch it through, do; otherwise, skip forward to the next video. 5. Pt 4 - Finishing Touches and Project: Now, if you skip the last video, I just want to show you a couple of things that I did. One of the things I did were some brushstrokes around here. Now, when I chose my brush, I chose a hard square brush here. But I also adjusted the spacing in the brush down to about 10 percent. I think it started off being about 29 percent but that painted with such jagged edges that you could really see the jaggy edges of the brush when I was painting on an angle. Sometimes, you may want to reduce the spacing down to about 10 percent to get smoother lines with your brush. Now, I just created these as a series of dots. This was a pin shape that was a closed shape, and I turned it into a selection, and then I used "Edit", "Fill" to fill it with black color. This was completed with a combination of shapes drawn with the Pen tool and either stroked or filled, depending on what made sense at the time. Now, let's just go and have a look here. What I did when I finished off was I just turned off these guides because I didn't need them any longer. I really want to see what the entire Mandela look like without those guides. Now, at this point, I could add a layer below everything. Just Control click on the New Layer icon, that's Command click on the Mac, to add a new layer. I'm going to fill this with white. White is my background color, Control Backspace on the PC, Command Delete on the Mac. Now, I did that as a separate layer because that allows me to just get the white edge of the Mandela back if I want to at a later date. Now, this Mandela is fine but there are a couple of other things I want to show you that you can do with a Mandela like this. I'm going to create what's called a stamp layer. I'm going to press Control Alt Shift and A, Command Option Shift A on the Mac. That gives me a layer that is the Mandela all by itself on its own layer. I still got all the layers that went to make it up intact, but I have a flattened layer if you like as well with the Mandela on it. Above this, I'm going to add a gradient fill layer. "Layer", "New Fill Layer", Gradient, click "Okay". I'm just going to put a radial gradient as colored radial gradient over the top of it just so you can get an idea as to some of the possibilities here. Then if we blend that down with a blend mode such as lighten, you can see that we get this interesting color effect through our Mandela. We can effectively color the Mandela without having to individually color the paces, should we want to do that. You can experiment with blend modes here. Now, the other thing that you can do is once you've got your Mandela on a separate layer is if you select the layer and press Control or Command I, you're going to invert the Mandela. Everything that was black becomes white and everything that was white becomes black. You've got an instant inverse color Mandela if you like. Of course, the way that things like gradient filled layers are going to impact that is going to be different because basically, most of the image is black rather than being white. Another thing that you can do is you can use a texture over the top of this. I'm going to select the topmost layer. I have a texture image that I'm going to open. It's a cracked paint texture. I'll give you the download link for this. I'm going to right-click the background layer, choose "Duplicate Layer", and I'm going to put it on top of my Mandela. If we go back to the Mandela, you can say that it's already in this document. What I want to do obviously is just blend it in. I'm going to run down the blend modes. You would do this on a PC just using the arrow key on a Mac, you will need to choose a tool that is not a brush tool. The Rectangular Marquee Tool is always an easy tool to select. Then you can press Shift plus and Shift minus to go down the list. Of course, the way that this texture is blending in, it's going to be different if we were to invert this layer. If you press Control I on this layer, you can see that the texture layer is impacting the Mandela in a different way so you get a whole lot of choices here not only in the blend mode that you use on the texture and on the gradient but whether or not you invert your Mandela. There's an introduction to creating Mandela art in Photoshop. Your project for this class will be to create a simple Mandela of your own and post a picture of it in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned something about creating Mandelas in Photoshop and rotating various objects, and also making use of things like the pen tool and the paintbrush tool for projects like this. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design For Lunch. I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.