Icon designer Kevin Andersson

As promised this is the first tutorial in a series, describing my process creating my illustrations and icons. Comments and suggestions for improvement of the articles are very welcome. Please bear in mind that English is not my mother tongue, but I hope the point comes across anyways; if not – please let me know.

My rambling are not necessarily the only way to archive your goal, but I hope you will learn a thing or two by reading this tutorial. If you have a better idea on how to solve some of the things I talk about you are very welcome to leave a comment.

So, what is this article about? Well as mentioned in a earlier post, this is not a step by step-plot in numbers-kind of tutorial. Those kinds of tutorial are nice, but I hope this will help you understand some basics of illustration, instead of just handing out numbers.

These articles will illustrate how to reach a certain goal, IE. how to get lighting right or how to use photoshops filters for things you don’t usually use them for. In this specific tutorial I will try to show you how I add mass to an object, using the tools available in photoshop.

It’s all an illusion

Creating the illusion of a 3d object in a 2d space (which our canvas in photoshop is), can sometimes be daunting. What I usually do is to split a object into several easier-to-handle parts. Spheres, cylinders and boxes are a good starting point. Let’s take a look at this character:

Basically it’s just a couple of circles and a few cylinders. What is it that gives this character the illusion of depth and mass? Well, highlights and shadows for one. But also the subtle differences in color, and most importantly luminosity. The brighter a color is, it seems to be closer to us; and the darker a color is it seems to be further away from us.

 Let’s take a look at how you create objects with the illusion of depth, shall we?

Creating a sphere

Creating a sphere is pretty simple, as long as you know a trick or two. It’s all about knowing your light sources, and how the light will reflect on the surface of your object. I usually begin the illustration with outlining my object with vector paths filled with a soft gradient. Let’s take a look on what we are trying to achieve:

Let me use a moment to explain why the use of paths is a good idea. Basically it boils down to you being able to rescale your illustration if necessary. But another good reason to make your illustration in a path is that you are able to export it to a vector program if you need to. It’s also very easy to edit your paths afterward, and you will always get a nice sharp edge.

Instead of using a solid color; I always use a gradient. Objects that appear one color are seldom 100% that exact color all over. Light, shadows, materials and reflectiveness all affect the perceived color of an object. Observe the objects around you, and study how light reflects, colors overlap and how the shadows fall.
 

Our sphere will consist of a couple of layers. After creating the initial shape we need to add some layer styles. To give the circle a bit of depth start by adding a inner shadow, with a fairly large distance and size. That creates the illusion of roundness. Never us the initial 75% on the layerstyles – it’s way to hard, turn it down to half. A small tip, while you have Inner Shadow active, you can click and drag on the canvas to move the it onto the position you want it to be. 

Adding a bit of inner glow will create a soft highlight. Using the Overlay blending mode adds some nice contrast in the colors.  

And at last add a Gradient Overlay from black to white set on Soft Light. Now turn the angle dial to reflect the position of your light source. 

The next thing we need to do is to define the shape even more. Adding highlights and shadows is very important. Even though most objects don’t seem reflective, they mostly are. Very reflective objects(mirrors, plastic, apple products ) have hard highlights. Adding a combination of hard and soft highlights all adds to the illusion of a solid 3d object. 

As you can see we have something that resembles a ball by now. But we still need a few finishing touches.

Create a copy of your initial shape, and set the color fill to 0%. By adjusting the color fill, we can remove the fill color of a layer, but keep any layer styles we add to the layer. Now add another inner shadow to the layer we just created, to add even more depth to our shape. Make the size way smaller than our original inner shadow – and set the blending mode to multiply if it isn’t already.

If you want to define the shape a bit more here’s a tip. Adding a very small outer glow with the color set to a dark shade of your object, it will pop out even more. 

Adding a inner glow with the color of our object at a very low opacity, and at a reasonable large size gives us a soft highlight.

The last thing we need to do is to add a small shadow. Take a look at the shadow on this picture. Do you see how it fades out the further it goes away from the object? Well – most shadows (depending on the light source ofcourse) blur out and loose some opacity the further they travel from an object. 

Objects also tend to bleed some of the color of the object to the surface, and nearby objects. So adding a tad of the spheres color on the floor adds to creating a believe able object.

This is what my layers look like. Download the PSD if you want to study it further.

If your like this tutorial – these are my thoughts for future ones:

Creating Materials

• Metals
• Glass
• Plastic
• Rubber
• Texture
• Wood

More than just spheres

• Creating complicated objects
• The power of adjustmentlayers
• Color correction

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