Photoshop Tutorials

Learn how to create a delightful portrait from sketch to Photoshop. This tutorial will teach you how to color, shade, and create a gorgeous beach scene.

Preview of Final Results

Beach Girl Drawing Photoshop Tutorial

The tutorial will teach you how to transform a pencil-drawing into a full-color piece of fantasy artwork entirely through the use of Photoshop.

For this project, you’ll need:

• A pencil sketch
• A scanner
• A Wacom tablet
• Some artistic understanding
• And a lot of patience

Part 1 – Prep

Firstly, let’s scan a pencil hand sketch and open it in Photoshop. No part of this pencil sketch will be in the final image. Rather it is entirely for reference purposes and we will be tracing and coloring over it.

Next let’s duplicate the sketch so it is on a new layer and its layer visibility can be turned off if we need to take a good, clear look at how the drawing we will be doing on top of it is progressing. It helps to fill the background layer with a solid color because it makes the image on top of it more visible. Here I filled the background in with a random pale blue color (#AACEFF if you were wondering) because the background of the final image will be predominantly blue.

Part 2 - Subject

Now it’s time to start putting the subject—the girl—together. Let’s start with the clothes. First, we’ll create a new layer to put the clothes on so that it won’t be disturbed when we start working on other parts of the girl. If you notice in the finished image, her clothes come in two different colors. Her top and the top part of her skirt are dark purple, whereas the rest of her skirt is pale lavender. We’ll be putting the two different colors of clothing on two different layers, I’ll call it “top and waist” and “skirt.”

Time to actually start the coloring process. First, we’ll take the pen tool (P) and draw a path along the outline of our subject’s top and the top part of her skirt. Zoom in (Z) and be sure to pay attention to details like the folds of her clothing. For parts of the clothing that will be covered by, say, her hair, we don’t have to pay much attention to the line since it won’t show in the final image anyways.

Once we’re do ne the outline, right click and select Fill Path… and set the Feather Radius to 0.5 to fill in her top and the top of her skirt with a medium to dark purple color.

Then repeat for the length of her skirt but fill with a very pale lavender. Now our image should something like this.

Before we go another further with coloring the rest of our subject, let’s work on and finish her face. The face and facial expression of any human subject will make or break the emotion of the entire finished piece, so this part is especially important. Zoom in very close and trace the outline of her mouth with the pen tool. Fill. Then pull out the tablet, select a soft, thin brush (B) and a soft black color for outlining the eyes. The tablet is pressure sensitive and will be able to most accurately bring out the emotions in the eyes.

As you can see, right now the face looks flat and lifeless, therefore, our next step is to shade in features of her mouth and add light to her eyes. Pick a light source—that is, the direction the light is coming from—so you know where to draw the highlights and where to draw the shadows. For this particular image, the light is coming from the top left corner, so there will be more light on the left side of her body and less on the right.

Chose a soft brush and use the tablet to add in shadows and highlights, manually picking colors. You can use the dodge and burn tool (O) to emphasize these shadows and highlights after you have put them all in place.

Doesn’t this look much better? Now to color in the rest of our subject—skin, hair, jingling coins, and the rest of the accessories. Return to the pen tool, trace the outlines, and fill everything in with their correct color. We should be here.

Be sure all of the layers are in their correct order, for example, her bangs are over her face and her shirt, her clothes on her body and not behind it, and her coins and accessories are on top of everything else.

Time to start shading everything in to give the image depth and life! Let’s start with our subject’s body and make her look more like a real person and less like a 2-D cartoon character. Keep in mind not only the light source but also the depth of our subject’s body. Parts that come more forward will be lighter than parts that are further back. For example, the sides of her waist are further back than her stomach therefore the sides will be shade in whereas the stomach will be highlighted.

Like before, manually pick colors to use as highlights and shadows and use the brush tool to fill them in. Then dodge and burn for emphasis. This image will later be juxtaposed against a predominantly pale blue background, therefore add in slight touches of blue in the middle of the shadows to make it feel that our subject is truly a part of the background once the final image is complete. The finished body should look something like this.

Repeat the steps above for the subject’s top and skirt. Keep in mind that clothing—fabric—is full of folds and creases, especially when wrapped around such an irregular figure as a human body. Draw in a shadow on the bottom of the fold and highlight the top. This makes fabric like more like fabric.

Here’s a record of our progress.

Now for the hair—what I personally think is the hardest and most time-consuming part of a coloring a human subject. First, we’ll draw in highlights and shadows where they are supposed to be using a large, soft brush and manually picking colors as usual.

Next, pull out your tablet and choose a very small smudge tool (R). Because we will be using the smudge tool to smudge these highlights and shadows in the direction of hair flow to create texture, we’ll want to set the strength to a high number. Here, I’ve chosen 85%

Using the smudge tool, drag the highlights and the shadows back and forth in the direction the subject’s hair is flowing. This makes the hair actually look like hair rather than a big formless blob. You should be getting this sort of effect.

This WILL take a long time to get all of the colors in their correct places to create the desired effect. However, it will be worth it in the end. See?

We are finally almost done with our subject! Keep your tablet out. The last step is to add detail to all of her accessories. First, let’s work on the coins. Choose a darker color for shadowing and add in all of the shadows, remembering the direction of the light source. For highlights, however, I chose to use the dodge tool instead. Because I want her accessories to look like they are made out of gold, using the dodge tool and setting the range to dodge “Highlights” will create a glow effect.

Once we have all of the coins shaded in, let’s move on to the remainder of her accessories. Same techniques apply—shade and dodge. I decided to add some purple gemstones to our subject’s accessories, as well as chains of beads. Color them in, making extra sure to add a bright sparkle and glow to the gems.

Our subject is complete!

Part 3 – Background

First, let’s merge all of the layers used for creating our subject so they don’t get confused with the layers we will use to create our background. I created a new file to finish off our image so I can keep a file with all of the subject’s layers as well. Because the plan for the background is to be a landscape, let’s make the new image horizontal. We’ll paste the subject in, and then create three layers, one for sand, one for ocean, and one for sky. Then, we’ll fill them in with color.

I chose to color the sky as well as the ocean as a darker color fading into a lighter color, such as the ocean looks darker when deep and becomes lighter when washing ashore. Alright, let’s begin with the sand. We went to give it a gritty texture. Go to Filter -> Noise -> Add Noise. Make sure you click the Monochromatic box or else you’ll end up with a load of multicoloured specks.

And now we have believable sand. Let’s move on and draw in the waves. Bring the tablet back, chose a small, hard brush, and draw in the foam that is created by waves rolling ashore. Also, use a larger brush at a low opacity and draw in a lighter, see-through blue underneath the rolling waves to give the effect of water so shallow you can see the bottom.

Using the same brush, add ripples into the shallow waves and set this layer to a lower opacity to make the ripples more believable.

Then, choose a dark tan color and fill in the shadows created by the foam and the ripples below them on the sand layer. Remember how earlier I noted that the shallow water should be see-through? This way, you will be able to see the shadows underneath the water.

Now, let’s not dare to try to draw in the pattern of the waves deeper in the ocean by hand. Let’s cheat a bit instead. Go online and randomly search up an image of ocean water that is large and high-quality. All we are looking for is texture to add on top of our color. I’ve pulled up an image like this.

Import the image of the waves we just pulled off the internet and paste it over the layer we have for the ocean. Make sure the texture image covers all of the water in our main image. Now if you look at the top of the little window on the right hand side of the screen that shows all of the layers, you’ll see adjustments for blending mode and master opacity. Let’s set the blending mode for the texture layer to Screen and the opacity to 50%.

We have our ocean!

Alrighty, we’re almost done! All that’s left are the clouds, the sun, rays of light, and a couple of starfish on the shore. For the clouds, let’s choose a large brush and set the opacity and flow both at 50%. Then, take the brush using the color white and draw circles to form the shape of clouds. Because the opacity is not 100%, we can layer the color more in places we want the clouds to be thicker, and less where we want the clouds to be translucent and wispy.

Let’s make the brush even larger and blot a sun in the top left of the image where we had previously decided would be the direction of the light source.

Now let’s draw in rays from the sun. I personally love this technique and have used it for quite a few of my images. It’s a really good touch to any image where the sun is out. In the two color palettes to on the left of the workspace, choose white for one and gray for another. Then go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds and we should get something like this.

Then, go to Filter -> Blur -> Radial Blur. Set the Amount to its 100 maximum and the Blur Method to Zoom. Then adjust the direction of the blur so that it’s epicentre comes from the location of the sun that we dotted and press OK.

And we get a motion like this.

Now set the layer blending to Overlay and all of the black in the image will disappear, leaving us with rays of sunlight!

Last Step!

Although the image could be considered finished right now, let’s add in some starfish on the shore for some more color and detail. Again, let’s go online and find a random image of a starfish. Import, duplicate, resize, and voila! We have a beach of starfish!

Now I’ll add in my watermark because I spent way too long on this image to have it stolen and passed off as someone else’s (I suggest everyone do the same to their own images) and…what? What?! We’re finally DONE!!!

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