Critters with Character in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class | Helen Bradley | Skillshare
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Critters with Character in Adobe Photoshop - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

teacher avatar Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Critters with Character in Photoshop - Introduction

      1:38

    • 2.

      Pt 1 - Research the Animal

      3:47

    • 3.

      Pt 2 - Body and Head

      5:58

    • 4.

      Pt 3 - Ears and Hands

      9:11

    • 5.

      Pt 4 - Eyes Nose and Tail

      5:31

    • 6.

      Pt 5 - Eyes and Shadow

      3:16

    • 7.

      Pt 6 - Clothe Your Character

      8:55

    • 8.

      Pt 7 - Rabbit to Pig

      8:39

    • 9.

      Pt 8 - Rabbit to Fox

      11:11

    • 10.

      Finishing touches Project and Wrapup

      2:41

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About This Class

Graphic Design for Lunch™ is a series of short video courses you can study in bite size pieces such as at lunchtime. In this course you will learn how to make a simple critter in Photoshop without needing to use the Pen tool! The characters are rendered in a single color and you will learn to make and warp the shapes and how to add simple shadows to differentiate body parts. You will see how to clothe your character, how to recolor the drawing and how to morph a character from one animal to another.

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Meet Your Teacher

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Helen Bradley

Graphic Design for Lunch™

Top Teacher

Helen teaches the popular Graphic Design for Lunch™ courses which focus on teaching Adobe® Photoshop®, Adobe® Illustrator®, Procreate®, and other graphic design and photo editing applications. Each course is short enough to take over a lunch break and is packed with useful and fun techniques. Class projects reinforce what is taught so they too can be easily completed over a lunch hour or two.

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Critters with Character in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch Class, Create Critters with Character 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 creating some cute critters using very simple designs in Photoshop. We're going to use shapes and we're going to learn how to bend shapes to our will. We're also going to create this as single color designs, which makes them very easy to recolor. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the process that I went through in putting these characters together. We're going to have a look at not only the character that we're going to build, but also a couple of other characters to see how you might go ahead and create them yourself. This class has jammed full of cuteness and Photoshop picnics as well. Now as you're watching these videos, you're going to see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. If you're enjoying the class, please do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up and say yes that you would recommend it to others. Secondly, write just a few words about why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations are helpful for other students. It helps them to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. Now if you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, 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 for an overdose of cute, let's get started making cute critters in Photoshop. 2. Pt 1 - Research the Animal: Before we move to Photoshop to actually draw the character that we're going to draw, which is going to be a rabbit, I'm going to step you through the process that I go through when I'm looking to create a new character. If you're pretty confident that you can do that, that you could draw out a character. What you're interested in is to take it to Photoshop bid, then skip forward to the next video. What I plan to do with this video was to create a cute rabbit character. So one of the research tasks I could undertake is to type rabbit in Google and just have a look at rabbits. What I'm looking at here is some characteristics that identify a rabbit. Things that make a rabbit a rabbit. I'm looking at ears, I'm also looking at the nose and probably also the tail. So I have three characteristics that I think are going to make my rabbit a rabbit. If I'm not a very good drawer, then I could also go to something like a search for how to draw a rabbit, and here I can see how other people are drawing rabbits. Now my rabbits are going to be very, very stylized. So it's going to be more than this, than it's going to be this. But I can learn a lot from looking at how other people draw rabbits. I'm looking at shapes, and I'm also looking at the point of view, where is this rabbit going to be relative to me, well, I'm liking this front on rather than aside on view. So I'm thinking about all these things as I'm researching, as I'm immersing myself in the world of rabbits. Now because I like my rabbits to be on the cute side rather than the realistic side, I might also go and do a search for kawaii rabbit because I love the kawaii style and this rabbit that we're going to create is also going to be drawn in the kawaii style. So that means big eyes and a small knows. It's also critical for this genre to get the positioning of the facial elements correct with kawaii characters, the eyes and the nose are pretty much on the same line, and so I'll be looking at things like this. Once I've done quite a bit of research on rabbits and thought about how I want my rabbit to look, I'm going to pick up a pen and paper. Now I do this on the nearest piece of paper, and I do it with a permanent marker. I don't use pencil because at this stage I want to start working on shapes because my character is so simple, it's going to be made up of simple shapes. So what I'm looking at is, how am I going to draw out this simple shape? What is my rabbit going to look like? So I'll draw it and I'll continue to draw it until I've got the shapes down. If I want a close character, generally, I'll draw the underlying body and then I'll draw the claws of the top. Because the shape of the body underneath is going to dictate what the claws look like because the clothes have to cover the body. So once I've drawn my character enough times that I'm pretty familiar with the actual shapes that I need to create that character, then I'm ready to go to Photoshop because it takes me a whole lot less time to draw out a character using pen and paper, then it would do to draw out the shapes in Photoshop. So I want to make the time I spend in Photoshop as short as possible, work as efficiently as possible, by creating shapes that I already are familiar with rather than experimenting with shapes in Photoshop. So that's the research and design process that I would go through before I hit Photoshop. So I have a plan on paper of what my character's going to look like, so rendering it in Photoshop is going to be pretty straightforward. 3. Pt 2 - Body and Head: We're going to work with a brand new document. I'm going to make mine 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels, which is going to be the final size. You don't want to be scaling up in Photoshop, so if you need to make this even larger, I'll click "OK". I've already chosen the color I'm going to work with. I'm going to work with a turquoise blue. The entire image is going to be rendered in either white or turquoise blue. That will make it really easy to recolor later on, and it's quite a nice little challenge to create a drawing or a design in just one color. I'm going to select it, and it's now my foreground color, I'm going to press "Alt+Backspace". On the Mac, I would press option Delete to fill my background layout with that color. Everything is going to be built on separate layers. That's pretty important because that allows us to add shading to differentiate parts of the animal from other parts. We'll start with the body, and for the body, I'm going to use ovals. Now this entire class is pin tool free. We're basically going to be designing this using shapes. I'm going to add a new layer, I'm going to drag out oval here. To fill my oval with the current background color, I will press "Ctrl+Backspace" on the PC, that will "Command+Delete" on the Mac. Now one of the tools we're going to use a lot in this class is the Warp tool, because that allows us to take something like this shape here and make it a little bit different. We'll choose "Edit", "Transform", "Warp". Now, the Warp that you're probably used to is this where you have a mesh over the shape and you can pull these things to reshape it. Well, let's just turn that off and let's have a look at another option you have with the Warp tool, and that is when this appears here. If you click this, it turns off, if you click it, it turns on. From this drop-down list, you have a whole heap of shapes that you can use to warp your shape, and we're going to use some of these. The one I'm going to use first of all right now is Bulge because that bulges this shape out, but you can see that it's pulled it up, so it's a little bit more of an oval. I want to bring it down. Instead of the bend being 50 percent, I'm going to type minus 40 percent and that's going to flatten this to a squatter shape. The bends, even though they're positive percentages by default, you can make them negative percentages to go the other way. I think this is actually a bit much, I'm going to take it to about 20. I just wanted to show you that tool. I'm going to the Move tool, I'm going to rotate this slightly because this is going to be the body of my rabbit. Again, I'm just eyeballing this. This is not rocket science. We're just looking for some basic shapes. I'm going to duplicate this layer, so I'm going to drag the layer onto the new icon, so I have two of these shapes on top of each other. This one, I'm going to flip, so I'll choose "Edit", "Transform", "Flip Horizontal", and then I'll move it over the other one. If I need to make sure that these two shapes are exactly centered, I'll select one, Shift click on the other layer, and then I have these options up here and I can click here to make sure that they are centered horizontally. That's basically my animal's body shape or at least the start of it. I'm going to select this layer, right click and choose "Merge Down". I now have one shape, that is my body. I'll press Control or "Command+D" on the Mac to deselect the selection. At this point, if I want to change the shape of this, I can use that Warp tool, Edit, Transform, Warp. I might want to do things like make the face a little bit wider, and may be bring this out a little bit. But you can see that you can shape things using this Warp tool. Once you've got a basic body shape, you can then come in here and tweak it to make it look the way you want it to look, and I'm actually thinking I'm going to bring the sides in a little bit and just going to push the legs down a little bit and click the check mark. This is going to be my body shape. Next up, we're going for the head. I'm going to add a new layer for that and I'm going to draw out an oval. I'm going to fill it with white. Currently, it's my background color, so that's Ctrl+Backspace on the PC, Command+Delete on the Mac. Just make sure that you have it on a separate layer. At this point, it might be a good idea to double-click and name your layers. It's very easy for them to get out of control later on. If you make it a habit to name them as you go, things are going to be a little bit easier. Now I want to warp the head, so I'm going to make sure that the head layer is selected and choose "Edit", "Transform", and I'm just going to choose "Warp" here. I want to bring in the top part of the head a little bit. I want to create a slight dent almost here. I'm just going to click the Check mark. This is my head shape. At this point, I can bring my head shape down over the top of the body. I'll press Control or Command+D to deselect the selection. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and differentiate the head from the body and add the ears, hands, and tail. 4. Pt 3 - Ears and Hands: To differentiate the head from the body, we're going to use a drop shadow. Click on the Head Layer, click the FX icon here and choose Drop Shadow. Those are the settings that you'll use for your drop shadow. Firstly, set the Blend Mode to Multiply because this is a darkening effect. Set the opacity to quite a low level because you don't want a very harsh shadow, you want it to be quite soft. I'm going to click on the Color option here and if I click on the background of my image, I'm going to sample the color that I'm working with. Well, I'm just going to drag downwards here until I get a darker version of that color for my shadow. So everything's keeping to this one color that we're using, just darker versions of it. I have used Global Light turned off. That's really important because that allows you to move this shadow around without affecting other shadows that you might have, you're going to use in the document. Distance and Spread are set to quite low values. This is Distance and you obviously want it to be a fairly small value so that the shadow is really close to the head. Spread tends to make the shadow very harsh and so you want it dialed down quite low, and size will fuzzy it up and you do want a little bit of fuzziness on that. You don't want the shadow to be really apparent, it's just a suggestion of some separation between the head and the body. The rest of the options are, as they would be, just by default. So you don't need to make any changes here and just click Okay. I'm going to put the ears on next, but I think the entire piece is a little bit too high up. So I'm going to click on the Head Layer, Shift, click on the body, go to the Move Tool and just move it down a little bit. I might also move the head down a little bit further too. You can see that the shadow is traveling with the head so it's always going to be attached to the head. It's going to go wherever the head goes. I'm going to add a new layer and we're going to create an oval for the ears. I'm going to drag out a fairly large oval, fill it with my background color by pressing Control and Backspace on the PC, Command and Delete, that would be on the Mac. I want to flatten the top of this, so I'm going to choose, Edit, Transform. I'm going to use just the Warp at this stage and I'm just going to drag outwards on these two top areas, and then the next little anchor points in there. That's going to flatten and make a little bit more round rather than point at the top of this oval. You can also drag inwards on these lines here. So if you want to suck in the side of your ear, you can do so. You might find it useful to be zoomed in a little bit if you're finding it a little hard to see things here. Also, if you get to this point and think, well, I think that it could have been sucked in a bit more, then just go back and choose, Edit, Transform, Warp, and just keep sucking it in. It's fine to do this a few times. You're not going to lose any detail in doing that. I'm going to grab my ear and just put it into place, I think it's a little bit too big. So I'm just going to Shift, drag from the top corner to size it in proportion, and tip it out a little bit so it's on an angle. Press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. I also find it handy just to click on, for example, the Marquee Tool so that everything's deselected and I can see what it all looks like. Well, I'm going to label this Ear and I'm going to make a duplicate by dragging it onto the new icon here. Grab the Move Tool, take the duplicate out of the way and rotate it to where I want it to be. Make this one a little bit higher up and I'm going to explain in a minute why. The reason I'm making this one, pulling it a little bit higher up is I want a little bit more ear here, because I'm going to cut it in two and bend it. To cut it in two, I'm going to the Polygonal Lasso Tool, that's going to allow me to draw straight lines by just clicking. So what I'm going to do is just sit about here, I'm going to click once and I'm going up at an angle. So I want to cut the ear at this angle here. Click and I'm just going to go all the way around the top of the ear, just making a large, lasso shape around the top so that the piece that I have selected is this part of the ear here. I'm going to take this to a new layer, so I'm going to choose Layer, New, Layer Via Cut. So it looks like this is just one ear piece here, but it's actually two pieces. So we can deal with them independently of each other and what I want to do is deal with this top piece independently of the bottom piece. So I'm just going to rotate it around and I'm going to position it roughly where I want the ear to be, so a little bit more like that. I click the check mark here and then let's zoom in. I got this quite lined up with these two corners in the same position, just going to check on that there. Now that I've got this corner anchored, it's just over the top of where the underlying earpiece was, I need to move this one down and I'm going to do that using a Distort Tool. So with the shape select, I'm going to choose Edit, Transform and I'm going to choose Distort. That's going to let me pull this down and out so I can alter this anchor point here to the exclusion of all the others. So I'm just going to place it in position here and click the check mark. I can also make the ear a little bit longer if I need to to compensate for the fact that I've just probably smooshed it a bit. So let's just click, away, and see how it looks. Well, it's looking pretty good here. It's probably a pixel out, but I'm not going to worry about that right now. You might want to tweak yours a little bit better. Now, I want a shadow to differentiate the front of the ear from the back so that we can see that it's bent. I'm going to borrow the shadow from the head, go to the Head Layer, right-click to get to the Menu and choose Copy Last Style. We're going to this top layer, which is this top part of the ear, and we're going to add the shadow to it by right clicking and choose Paste Layer Style. So it just pastes that layer style in. If I press Control zero on a PC, Command zero on a Mac, we can see the ear in place. The hands are just going to be a small oval, so I'm just going to create a new layer for them. I'm going to draw out a small oval, again, filling it with white using that Control Backspace, Command Delete option. Edit, Transform, I'm going to do my Warp and I'm going to choose my Bulge Warp and try minus 50 on this. Probably a bit more than that. Minus 60 to get some little hands here and click the check mark. So I've got my hand here on a layer, press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now, if I'm happy with using that as my hand, I can just drag it into position. If you want to crop the top off to get a slightly less sharp top, this is what you would do. Let's go to the Hand Layer, let's go to the Elliptical Marquee Tool. I'm going to drag out an ellipse that has a softer top. As I'm drawing it, I'm going to hold the Space Bar so I can move it into position. So I haven't finished drawing the ellipse, my finger is still on the Left Mouse Button. When I hold the Space Bar, I can move the ellipse around. When I'm happy with it, I'm just going to let go. I've got the Hand Layer selected, I've got an oval shape like this and I want to cut off the bit that's not selected. So I'll choose, Select, Inverse, and then just press Delete. That just lops the top off the hand. Control or Command D to deselect the selection. So this is giving me what I'm happier with as a hand. I'm going to move it into position and rotate it a bit. I'm going to click the check mark. It's a bit hard to see at this point, but why don't we just go and put a drop shadow onto this. I still have the drop shadow probably on the clipboard. So I'm going to Right Click and here it is, yes, Paste Layer Style. So I can just paste that layer style into position which allows me to put the hand on the rabbit, and we can see it because it's bringing its drop shadow with it. I'm going to duplicate the Hand Layer by dragging it onto the new icon there. Go to the Move Tool, drag it across to where it's going to be. Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal and it's bringing its own drop shadow with it. In the next video, we're going to put the facial features on the rabbit, so we're going to make it a [inaudible] rabbit. 5. Pt 4 - Eyes Nose and Tail: For the facial features, I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can see the face a little bit more clearly. If you want to move it into position, just hold the Space bar as you move it. I'm going to draw an eye, so I'm going to need a brand new layer, and I'll just draw an eye holding the Shift key as I draw a circle. I want to fill this with a really dark color. So I'm going to click on the foreground color, I'm going to my green, and I'm just going to drag this all the way down to get a very dark green that's almost black but not quite. Alt Backspace, that would be option Delete on the Mac. I'm going to call this eye. I'm going to duplicate it so I get a second eye that's exactly the same size as the first, and I'm just going to start moving it across. I'm going to put these two eyes on the same plane. So I want them to be even. I'm just using these smart guides to do that. One of the secrets about creating Kawaii characters is that the further down the face you're able to put these eyes the cuter it looks. Also the further apart the eyes are the cuter it looks. So you want things not in the middle of the face, you want them quite low on the face. We're going to add the nose while we're here. So I'm going to create a new layer. For this, I'm going to use a shape, but it's actually not going to be rendered as a shape, it's going to be rendered as pixels. But I'm going to the rounded rectangle tool. From the drop-down list here, I'm going to use pixels. If you're working in an earlier version of Photoshop, you'll have icons for this, but you want it to read pixels. I've got this shape selected right now, so I'm going to press Control or Command D to deselect that shape, turn off the matching ends. I'm going to draw out a shape that's going to become my nose or the top of my nose. I don't want it to be terribly big, it's filling automatically with the foreground color. With this selected, I'm going to choose Edit, Transform, Warp. I'm going to use the built-in warps, and I'm going to use this arc here. Now the arc by default goes up, but we already know that we can make things bend the opposite way by going down. So at the moment, the bend is 50 percent, so I'm going to make it minus 50 percent, and that just flips it so it goes down. I'll click the check-mark. At this point, I can select the Move tool, I can make it a little bit smaller if I want to, and I can also shrink it in height a little bit if I want to. I'm just going to move it into position. Again, as this is a Kawaii style character, having the nose pretty much on the same plane as the eyes will enhance its cuteness. I'm going to call this top of the nose. To make the bottom of the nose, I'm just going to make a duplicate of this, and just move it down. We're going to join the two pieces with another one of these filled rectangles. So I'm going to create a new layer, again go to this rounded rectangle. We are going to stay with pixels. None of these are shapes or paths or anything. I'm just going to draw in a nose piece that's pretty much the same thickness as the rest of the nose. Because it's independent, you can move it into position if you want to. You could also select these three layers, the middle of the nose and the top and bottom, and you could click here on the Center option and that will center all of these over the top of each other. Now, while it would make good sense at one level to join all these pieces together to make a nose, I'm going to show you why I wouldn't. Right now this bunny is smiling, but let's go to the bottom of his nose here and let's take that and rotate it 180 degrees. If I move it down, by keeping these two pieces separate, I've now got a borderline angry bunny instead of a happy bunny. So by keeping some pieces separate, pieces that you know that you might want to flip because that's going to change the character of the animal, then that might make better sense to do. Now, I'm going to go back and I'm going to put the mouth back where it came from. I'm also thinking that all of these elements are a little on the big side. So I'm going to grab all of them and just shrink them a little bit. The rabbit can also use a tail. So the tail is just going to be a circle shape tucked behind the rabbit. So again, I'm going to make a new shape here, add a new layer. I'm going to put this at the very top of the last stack. Let's call it tail. Let's fill it with our white color as we have been doing all along. Now the problem with this tail is that it's in front of the rabbit. We need to move it down so it's behind even the body of the rabbit. That needs to come all the way down to the end of this last stack. I'm just going to start dragging it down until I get it into position. I want it to be behind the body. So it's going to be between the body and the background. Now if I move it into position, I can go to the body now, right-click and put our last style in, and when I do that, you can see that the tail is now separated from the body. It's tucked in behind the body. 6. Pt 5 - Eyes and Shadow: We have nearly finished the foundation of this character, but I want to anchor him to the ground which means he needs some shadow underneath him. I'm going down to the background layer, I'm going to select on that. I'm going to drag out an oval because this oval is then going to be behind the entire rabbit and behind his tail. It's going to be behind everything. I'm going to add my new layer. I'm going to make sure that I'm working with the color I've been working with, but I'm going to make this just a little bit darker. I'm going to fill this circle with that color. It's the foreground color, I'll "Backspace" on the PC or "Option Delete" on the Mac. I'll press "Control" or "Command D" to deselect the selection. Now, I'm going to use multiply blend mode here, and I'm going to dial down the opacity quite low because I just want a slightly shaded background here. If you think your shape is too big, you can just come in here and adjust it using the move tool. That's anchored my rabbit a little bit better on the ground. Now one other thing I wanted to show you was the possibility of changing the rabbit's eyes. There is another Kawaii eye that you can use which builds on this black shape, but it adds some white elements in. I'm just going to add a new layer, and I'm just going to put these on a new layer. I'm going to zoom in so we can see the eyes a little bit more clearly. I'm going to drag out a very small circle holding the "Shift" key. This one's going to be about half the size of the eye. I'm going to fill it with white. I'm just going to move it into position but I'm going to have to zoom in very close to do that. You can set it over the side of the eye or you can set it just inside the eye like this. Then you're going to make a second cycle. It's going to be a bit smaller and it's going to overlap the first. I'm going to put both of these on the same layer, so I'm just going to "Control Backspace" to add the white there. Let's just go back out. This is also a Kawaii style eye. If I want a term, I'm just going to call this highlights, and you can go and take them and move them across once they're duplicated to the second eye. They're going to be in the same position in the second eye. That's another Kawaii style effect. We've got the basics of our rabbit here. We've got all the elements that go together to make a rabbit. In the next video, I'm going to go ahead and close the rabbit. We're going to give him a little overall and a hat. Then in the final videos, we're going to have a look at a couple of other characters that have been built off the same body shape. I'm going to show you the things that I did that helped me build up the elements that made those characters who they are. We're going to have a look at a fox and we're going to have a look at a pig. If you're interested in those other body shapes, you may want to just skip ahead. If you want to see how they cloth this character, we're going to do that in the next video. I'm going to use some elements from my whimsical texture class. We're going to use some of the brushes that we made there, as well as the pattern we're just going to make on the fly. 7. Pt 6 - Clothe Your Character: We're going to go ahead now and cloth this rabbit. One of the important things is to really keep an eye out on your layers palette. This is the rabbit that I've saved, so I'm going to reuse it over and over again every time I want to re-cloth it. I've gone through and made sure that all of my layers are named. It's really important to keep things separate because you might need to tuck things underneath each other, so you don't want to flatten this at all. We're going to put a little overall on the rabbits. We're going to start with a rectangle. I'm going to draw out my rectangle, put it on a new layer, and fill it with the color I'm going to be working with. I'm also going to rotate it around and just place that in position here. Once I've done that, I'm going to duplicate it and flip it horizontally. Pretty much everything on this rabbit is getting flipped horizontally. You can see right now where the shorts are going to be, the pants on this rabbit are going to be over the top of his arms right now. Well, that's going to change later on. We're just going to change the order of it later on, but just be aware that you want to keep this layering correct. Put the two pieces here. I'm just going to merge those down to make a single layer. Then I'm going to my Warp tool just to warp everything into place so that I can curve it appropriately around the body underneath. I'm going to add another layer and I'm going to create a big front now. I'm going to put this over the entire shape and I'm making sure that I'm lining this up because I have the ability to do so because he's pretty much centrally placed in the document. Just going to fill that shape with the fill that I want, and I'm going to carve a piece out of it. I'm actually going to go and make a selection that is a small rectangle here to get the shoulder straps, if you like, so I'm on this layer. I'm just going to press delete. That just helps me curve out the piece that I made. Obviously, everything's in the wrong position in the last stack. First of all, I'm going to put this big front underneath the pants, so it's going to be clipped later on. That will really help. I'm going to pick up the whole outfit which is these two layers. I need to move it so it's underneath the hands, underneath the face, but it has to be in front of the body and in front of the tail. Just drag them down the last palette and just watch what's happening. Well we're underneath the hands now, but we're not yet underneath the face. Here we are now. You can see that the face is now clipping that piece of the clothing. Just a really handy, very easy way of doing it. Now, if you want to decorate the clothing. I'm actually going to use a brush that I created in another one of my classes on whimsical patterns. I'm going to give you a link to that class. We're going to add a new layer in here. I'm going to my brush, and because in that class, we saved it as a brush preset, we can reuse it. Here are the brush presets, and here is the brush. If you're interested in that class and how we made this brush, I'll post a link to it in the class project area for you. I'm just going to make this a dark color, make sure I'm working on this layer. I'm going to shrink the brush down a bit using the open and close square bracket. I am just going to paint this little hand-drawn dashes onto his shorts. I'm doing a pretty spectacularly lousy job of this but you get the idea. Once I've done that, I want to clip this through the layer that contains the shorts. The easiest way to do that is to select this paint layer here, click on it and choose layer, create clipping mask. Because the shorts is immediately underneath, it means that the paint stripes are now clipped to the shape of the shorts. If we were to move the shorts, for example, you'll see that the paint just stays in position. It's all just clipped to that. But you can also go to the paint layer and you can move it, if you need to, so you can position the paint where you want it inside the shorts. Just a nice easy way of handling clothing like this. Now, I'm going to put a hat on him as well, and so the hat needs to be over the top of this ear, over the top of the head, over the top of this part of the ear, but underneath this one. I'm going to look for my earpieces. This is the right ear folded, and because of the layering that I was really careful to do all the other places, this part of the right ear, this left ear, and the face are all underneath here. Provided I put something underneath the right ear folded and on top of everything else, it's going to be in the exact correct layer. But of course you know that if you don't get it right the first time, you can just come and drag it into position. I'm going to use the Elliptical Marquee tool to just drag out an ellipse that I'm going to fill with the color that I'm using here. Move this into position and I want to distort it a little bit so edit, transform, warp. I'm going to use this arc and I want to arc it a little bit less than that. But I do want it to go in an upwards direction, so let's try 10 percent. Now, the other thing that you can do with these warps is that the horizontal and vertical allow you to turn one end of this shape a little bit different to the other. I'm just going to put a 20 percent horizontal on this. You can see that this end of the shape is bulging. I really like that effect, it's just the wrong end. I'm just going to make it minus 20, and here we've got the bulge on this end, and on the other end. These warps can be really handy for getting nice smooth shapes without having to do a lot of work in creating them. I'm just going to put this here. It's like a little hat, almost like a Tam O' Shanter. I'm going to add a new layer and I'm going to put a circle on that for the little palm palm thing on top. Again, I'm going to fill that. Now, the reason why I've kept the Tam O' Shanter and the palm palm separately because I want to add a pattern to the hat that's not part of the palm palm. I going to create a new document, 200 pixels by 200 pixels in size. I'm going to give it a transparent background. We're very quickly going to create a pattern. I'm just going to press the letter D to get my default colors. I'm going to the brush tool and I just want something like one of these brushes, doesn't really matter too much what it looks like. I'm going to hold the shift key and I'm just going to brush in a downwards direction. Let go the shift key and then start again. I'm going to click, hold down the shift key, and brush down. Click over here, hold the shift key as I brush across and ditto here, click hold the shift key as I brush across. By holding the shift key as I brush across, I'm making sure I'm painting straight lines. That means that this is going to be a nice little repeating pattern. Edit, define pattern, just click ''Okay''. Very simple stuff. Now, I'm going to add a layer in here, but I'm going to take the opportunity to select this Tam O' Shanter , this hat layer first. I'm just control clicking on the layer thumbnail. Now, I'll choose layer, new fill layer, pattern, click ''Okay''. You can see that by doing that, by making the selection before I actually grab my pattern, the pattern is being constrained to the selected shape. Just makes a little bit easier for me to say the pattern in situ to determine whether it's what I want and the size that I want. I'm really happy with that. I'm just going to click ''Okay'', and now I'd like to add a little line around the edge of the hat that's not covered by the pattern. We can do that with a stroke. I'm going to select this layer here, and I'm going to click ''FX'' and click ''Stroke'' because this allows me to add a stroke around the shape. Now, it's orange from another class that I did, but I can just click on that. Let's just go and select the color we're working with. It's on the outside. That's really important because if it was on the inside, it would be hidden behind this pattern. We want it to be on the outside so we can see it. Let's just give it a couple of extra pixels just so we can see it. Opacity is a 100 percent. Nothing very special about what we've got here, except that we now have a line around our hat with the pattern trapped inside it. There's a simple way of clothing a character just using the same process as you used for creating the character in the first place. Just warping the shapes, looking at places that you can cut it out and fill, and of course, all of these are on separate layers. If we want to get rid of the hat, that's really easily done. We can just turn off those layers. 8. Pt 7 - Rabbit to Pig: I've reopened my rabbit here and what I want to do is turn my rabbit into a pig. There are a few things that we can just go and get rid of. One of them is obviously the tail can go because that's not a pig's tail. The nose can also go. Let me grab all of those pieces and delete them. I also want to get rid of the earpieces. At this point, you can see how handy it would be if you actually labeled all your layers because it's going to be very easy to find the pieces you need to get rid of. I'm going to draw my head in before I get rid of this head because I want to borrow the shadow from it. I'm going to just drag out a ellipse for the head. I'm going to add a new layer, and I'm going to fill it with my color. I'm going to use the warp tool to just square it off a little bit. I want to bring the top down a bit to flatten a little bit in the bottom and maybe the insides a bit. I want to cross between an ellipse and a rounded rectangle. Of course, you can work on yours a little bit to get it a bit more even, but let's just position it in place and use the rabbit's face as a guide for the size. I think the size is going to be pretty near the same. The rabbit's face is underneath, so I'm just going to turn it off, but it has a drop shadow on it. I'm just going to drag the drop shadow up and put it on the pig's face before I get rid of the head that I don't need of the rabbit. Now, I have a pig's head instead of a rabbit's head. Then one of the other things that makes a pig is the snout. Again, I'm going back to my ellipse tool, turn off the marching ends and draw out an ellipse for the nose and fill it. Same thing, I'm just going to transform it using the warp tool. I want to do the exact same thing to bring in the edges of the nose to straighten them up a little bit and bring in the top. Again, looking for this cross between an ellipse and a rounded rectangle. If you're not happy with the shape, you can just keep working to perfect it. I'm just going to keep moving forward. I'm not really happy with the color, so I'm going to lock the pixels on this layer. Go and get the background color so I can use that and fill the pixels on this layer with that color. The pig will have a snout, so it's going to have a couple of nostrils in its snout. I'm going to draw out my circles holding the Shift key as I do that. I'm going to use a color that is halfway between the background and the color that I'm using on the nose already. Once I've created that nostril, I'm going to create a duplicate. Go to the move tool, and then I'm just going to use the Shift arrow key to move the nostril across. The body is way too narrow for a pig and tend to think in terms of pig's being a bit plumper than this. Again, I'm going to the warp tool, but you notice that I don't have to rebuild the body. I just have to reshape it. I'm going to take what was a rabbit's body and make it into a pig's body in just a few seconds worth of work. Now the pig has funny little ears. They're like little pointy ears. You could draw out the ears or you could borrow a shape for the ears. I'm actually going to put the ears just above the head. I'm going to add a new layer. I'm going to the custom shape tool, but I'm still going to be working on pixels. I'm going to open up this panel and have a look. Now, these are the default shapes that come with Photoshop, and you know what? We could use this heart that it would probably be a pretty good foil for the pig's ears. There's a couple of versions of the heart. Let's just go and see what we can do with it. Flip my colors around and go and put it in. Now, I'm just going to rotate it and put it behind the pig's head. Now, the ear is in front of the head, so it's not getting any benefit from the drop shadow. I'm just going to move it behind the head and click away. You can see that there's a little bit of the drop shadow showing here. If we needed to, we can just re-open the drop shadow and we can perhaps make the size a little bit bigger and perhaps the distance a bit just to pick up a little bit of extra shadow at the top here. I've got one ear, so I'm just going to grab it to make the second ear. So here is an ear. Grab the second ear, move it across, flip it horizontal, and just pop it into place. Now the thing that's possibly going to be the most challenging for this pig is how do you draw a little curly tail without using a pen tool? Well, it took me a few minutes to work this one out, but I think I have an awesome solution for this. Let's go to the background layer because we want the tail to be in behind the pig. I'm going to add a new layer here, and I'm going to the text tool. I'm just going to type the lowercase letter e because a lowercase letter e when you write it in a script font, it's going to look very much like a pig's tail. It's just that the font I'm using right now is not big enough and it's not the right shape. Here is the letter that I have and I found a font that is a free font, and I'm going to give you the download link for it. This is it's huruf moran T bold and it's a free font so you can get the download link for it. Let's just move away and see what it looks like. It looks very much like a pig's tail. Once you've drawn it out and you've got pretty much the size you want, I'm going to right-click and choose to rasterize the type because I don't want this to be a typed letter any longer, I just want it to be some filled pixels. I'm going to go to the move tool and I'm going to flip it. I'm going to choose Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal, so it's pointing in the opposite direction. I'm just going to move it behind the pig. There's the solution to the pig's curly tail. It's just the letter e created in a font that has this nice script look to it. Now the other thing that I did with my pig was I went and did something with the hand. I'm just going to target this layer and I'm going to zoom in so we can see what we're going to do here. This is the hand that we're looking at. What I did was I grabbed the elliptical marquee tool and I dragged a circle over the pig's foot here. What I was looking for was this line through here. I'm going to take this hand copy layer with the top part of this selected and I'm going to choose Layer, New, Layer via Cuts. That puts this hand on a layer all by itself. You can see already it's picked up this drop shadow. What I'm going to do is just move it a little bit away from the tip of the hand. Then I'm going to cut this in two. I'm going back to the hand copy layer, which is this little bit down here. I'm going to go back to my polygonal lasso tool, and I'm just going to draw a line through the pig's foot here. I'm going to grab this, and I'm going to, with this part of the hand selected, this little tip here, again, I'm going to choose Layer, New Layer via Cut. I'm going to move this just a couple of pixels out of the way. Now if I go to the hand at the top and just widen it a little bit. Let's see what we've got here. We've got something that looks a little bit like a pig's trotter rather than the hand of a rabbit. I'm just going to move this a little bit closer, I think they were too far apart. This hand can go. We need to locate where it is, which is here and just trash it. I'm going to take these three pieces which all comprise this hand here, and I'm going to drag them onto the new icon. Then I'm going to choose Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal, and then I'm just going to move them into place. I think actually the hands can come over a little bit, so got one hand in a better position. I'm going to move this one across a little bit. There's how you can take the basic building blocks of your rabbit and you can make it into a pig. 9. Pt 8 - Rabbit to Fox: Again, I've removed all the pieces from the rabbit that we don't need and we're going to make it into a fox. First thing we're going to do is adapt some of the colors here. I'm going to the background shape here and I'm just going to sample it because we're going to need it in a minute. But I'm also going to sample it twice because I want to make it into a darker color that we can use for the background. I'm going to fill the background with that darker color. Now we're going to the body, and I'm going to lock the pixels on the body, and I'm going to fill it with the new background color, which is this lighter color that we're working with. I'm also going to do the same thing for the hand, so again, just locking the hands, and pressing Control Backspace, Command, Delete on the Mac just to change the color of this hand. I'm going to leave the face as it is because I'm not actually going to use that face. Let's go back to the body of the fox and let's just adjust it a little bit in terms of its shape. Again, we don't have to remake the body, we just have to adapt the shape that we have to something that looks a little bit more fox like. It's going to be a little bit thinner, a little bit more so that. Now the fox has a V-shape bib here. I'm going to do that using a heart shape. I'm going to create a new layer, I'm going to my custom shape tool, going to make sure I'm working with pixels every time we're going to be working with pixels here, and I'm going to select the heart I'm going to use, which is this one here. They'll be different to the one we used for the pig, I just think it's a nicer heart. Now, I can sacrifice either of these colors right now because I've got both of them in the image, so they're very easy to sample. I'm going to make this a white. For the heart I'm just going to draw it into position and just move it to where I want it to be. I'm using the space bar, when I hold that down, I can move the shape into position. This is the V-shape that I want for the fox. But you can see it's a bit bigger than the fox's neck. Well, we can use a clipping mask to clip the white shape to the body shape underneath. We'll click on this little white heart-shaped layer here and choose layer, create clipping mask, and that does clips the shape to the underlying body shape. Of course, if we need to move it, we can just come in here and just adjust the positioning of the shape within that clipping mask. Let's go to the hands here. I'm just going to move the hand in a little bit. What I want to do with this hand is actually give it a tip that is this darker color. I'm going to drag out an ellipse holding the space bar as I move it just into position over the tip of the hand here. Now what I'm going to do is lock the pixels on my hand, but I already had the locks, I'm just going to make sure they're locked here. Because I have this selection made, if I now go and sample the background color from the image and press "Alt Backspace" that would be Option Delete on the Mac. I'm going to fill just a portion of the hand that is within this selection with the color, so now I can unlock those pixels. I don't need the right-hand, so I'm just going to trash it. I'm going to make a duplicate of the left hand, transform it horizontally and just move it into position, so I'm using one hand to make the second one. Let's look now at the fox's head. I'm going to keep the rabbits head, but I'm just going to hide it. I'm going to add a new layer of the fox's head, and let's just put it in position where we want it. I'm going to the Elliptical Marquee tool, and I'm just going to drag out an ellipse that will work for my fox's head. Now, it needs to be colored with this lighter green color to match the body. I'm going to fill it and then I'm going to warp it. For the highlights on the fox's face, I'm going to make some white filled oval. Again, I'm going back to my ellipse tool, I have a new layer and I'm just going to drag out the ellipses. I'm just going to position it where I want it to be and size it as I go. Now this is going to be two shapes that we're just going to overlap and then clip later on. But I'm looking for the curve that is going to go here over the fox's eye. Again, I'm going to need to go and sample white that I'm using, and on this new layer, fill that shape with white. I'm going to duplicate this layer and then I'm going to move the second copy of this oval into position. I'm going to deselect my selection and then merge these two layers together so I have a single shape here. Let's go to the fox's face, I'm going to the Magic Wand tool here, I'm going to click on the fox's face to get the shape of the fox's face. I'm going back up to this white filled layer. Right now what I have selected is everything that is on the white filled layer inside the fox's head. Well, I want to invert that selections because I want to get rid of the bit on the outside. I'll choose Select Inverse and then press "Delete", and that just clips that shape to the fox's head shape. Again, I'll press Control or Command D to deselect the selection. Now we still have a problem with our shadow missing, but we can bring up the shadow from the rabbit's head that we had kept away. We'll add it to the fox's head and then we can just get rid of the rabbit's head because we don't need that any longer. The fox's ears, I'm going to do them as true tone ear. First of all, I'm just going to add a new layer for this. I'm going to make my first outside ear the body color, so I'm going to make the body color my foreground color because I want to use the heart shape. I'm going back to custom shape, I'm going to grab my heart shape, and I'm just going to drag out the heart for the fox's ear. It doesn't matter where I put it because it's this lighter color, it's very easy to see. I'm going to rotate it around and just pop it in position. Once I'm happy with this, I'm going to make a duplicate of it, so I'm just going to drag it onto the new layer icon. I'm going to sample the darker color, I'm going to lock the pixels on this layer, and I'm going to fill this second version of the ear with the darker color. Now I'm going to the Move tool, I'm going to hold Alt and Shift to just size down the heart so that we have a small inner one and an outer one. That's basically going to be my ear. Now, I can merge these two layers together by just right-clicking and choose merge down, and so that's going to give me one layer, which is this ear. It needs to go behind the head, so I'm just going to drop it down behind the head so it's clipped by the head. Of course we need a second one, so let's just name this so it's a little bit easier to find, and let's go and make a duplicate. We're going to flip it horizontal, and then we're just going to move it into position on the other side of the fox's head. We need a tail and the tail is going to need to be behind the body. I'm going to click on the shadow, which is the next to last layer, add a new layer, and I'm going to make a oval for the fox's tail. Now that's going to be in this body color, so we're just going to sample the body color and fill that shape. I'm going to select over the top of the shape with another oval because I want to make this white for the tip of the fox's tail. Well, this is the tail layer here, so I'm going to lock the pixels on that layer. I'm going to do exactly what I did earlier with the fox's hands. Because I've got these pixels locked and because I've got a selection over this shape, I can press Control Backspace, Command, Delete on the Mac to fill just the area here that's selected with my white. I'm going to deselect my selection and then go and warp the tail. What I'm aiming for is a twisted shape here, and now I can just move it into position and rotate it if I need to. Because the tail is behind the body and because the body has a shadow on it we're seeing the definition here. There are a couple more things to finish with the fox's face, and that is to add some eyes and a nose. I'm just going to zoom in here a little bit. I'm going above the face because I want the eyes to be over this piece here, so I'm going to make sure I'm working above that, I'll add a new layer. I'm going to the rounded rectangle tool, but again, we're working with pixels. I'm going to make sure that this darker color is selected so that when I draw, I'm drawing in that color. I'm just going to draw out a long filled rectangle, which I'm then going to warp. Now in this instance, I'm going to use one of the built-in warps. I'm going to select arc, but this time I'm going to bend it in a negative direction around about minus 50. I'm going to rotate the shape a little bit and just position it here. Once I've made that shape, I can duplicate it. I can flip it horizontally and then move it into position on the opposite side of the fox's face. Finally, I want a nose on the fox. I'm going to work just above this white layer here, going to add a new layer. I have the color I want to work with already selected. I'm going to just draw out an ellipse. I'm going to position it pretty much where I want it to be and I'll fill my pixels with that color. All I want to do is to clip it to the shape of the white layer underneath. Let's go to the white layer underneath and let's select it. I'm going to do that with the Magic Wand tool. You can see I now have this shape selected, going back to my nose piece, which is this layer here. If I were to press Delete now I'm going to wipe out this part of the nose and leave the bit that I don't want. I'm just going to invert the selection and press "Delete". That just clips the nose to the shape of the face. We now have a fox that we've created from all the pieces that we had prepared for our rabbit, and we just had a look at what makes a fox the fox, there's face, the ears, and the tail, and we've been able to convert our character very quickly and easily. 10. Finishing touches Project and Wrapup: We've built all our characters using a single color. They're going to be very easy to recolor. To recolor any of these characters, you want to select the top-most layer in the layer stack and then choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue/Saturation, and click "OK". All you need to do now is to just drag on the hue slider. As you do this, all the colors in the illustration are going to change accordingly. So they're all going to change to different tints and shades of the color that you're selecting on the hue slider. When you're happy with the color that you selected, you can just close down this panel. This layer, being an adjustment layer, can be enabled or disabled as required. You can also double-click on the thumbnail here to reopen the dialogue and just adjust the color should you wish to do so. Your project for this class is going to be to create a character of your own. Whether you dress the character or not is up to you. If you would like to extend this just one step further, then take the basics of the elements that you've created for your one character, and make it into a second character of your choice. You're welcome to use the rabbit, pig, and fox designs that I've shown you here or you can sketch out and use designs of your own. Just be sure that as you build your characters up layer by layer, you not only name your layers for convenience, but also make sure that they're ordered logically so that the tail is for example, behind the body of the animal and the face is on the top so that your drop shadows are going to work perfectly. Post an image of your character in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this class, and that you've learned quite a bit about working in Photoshop, and also seeing the potential for working in Photoshop without needing to use the pen tool, and still to be able to create interesting shapes pen tool free. If you did enjoy this class and when you see a prompt to recommend it to others, please do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs-up and secondly, write in just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to see that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, 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's 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.