Sticker tutorial

3 October 2008

I received some e-mails with question how have I done stickers on my splash page. Well, I already answered on this mails, but i thought lately it could be a nice topic for tutorial. It’s pointed for those, who use photoshop.

I won’t start with “create a new document…”- You already know that. Tutorial is pretty simple and quite easy, but it’s aiming for a beginners who already know some functions in photoshop. If You have some problems, post a comment.

Step 1
Start with a circle. You can make that thru the eliptical marquee tool with filling it with some pink color. In the image below You can see that which one I choosed (#A87387). Then You can color it with gradient or dodge and burn tool. At last use polygonal marquee tool and cut out some part of sticker. We will be need it lately.

Step 2
Paste in our cutted part and rotate it by 180 degree with EDIT>TRANSFORM>ROTATE 180. Give it the shine and shadow with a gradient or by burn and dodge tools. Then place some shadow under the cutted part with 90% hard rounded brush, opacity about 50-60%.

Step 3a
Now select main shape of sticker by CTRL+CLICK on layer in layers window. Then again hold CTRL and CLICK on small new layer icon in the same window (or just click CTRL+SHIFT+N and place layer under the main shape). Then fill it with some dark color. It could be black, or some very dark bronze.
Go to EDIT>TRANSFORM>DISTORT and modify the shape as i did on the image below. It will add special effect to shadow.
At the of this step we will add some lights on borders. It’s pretty simple, but add a bit of dimension and shine to our sticker. To do that, just make a select (firstly of main shape, lately of upper small part), fill it on the layer with some light color, then move selection 1px to right (use arrow on keyboard), click DELETE, cancel selection and with some round brush erase the edges. Then You can move it 1px to the right and set layer mode to overlay or soft light.

Step 3b
Now place some text above the main shape, rotate it a bit and apply blending options as You see below.

Step 4
If You want to change a color of sticker, You can do that in several ways. I decided to do that with adjustment layer. Make a selection of main shape, select in layers window the highest layer and then go to LAYER>NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER>COLOR BALANCE. Then apply settings as i did below. If You want to change the color again, just click twice on the icon of adjustment layer in layers window.

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