How to Create an Awesome See-Through Water Horse in Photoshop

Step 19

Duplicate “Water Splash 3” layer by pressing Ctrl + J and move rotate it slightly to the left.

Step 20

Place “Water Splash 4” on the back of the horse.

Step 21

Duplicate “Water Splash 4” by pressing Ctrl + J and make it smaller. Place it on the back foot.

Step 22

Duplicate the layer you just placed on the foot one more time and position it on the other foot.

Step 23

Duplicate on the foot layers and place it on the front foot.

Step 24

For the elongated foot duplicate one of the water layers you used on the feet but use Warp to stretch it a bit. Also make it a little bigger. To use Warp with the Free Transform press Ctrl + T inside the box that encompasses the layer and choose Warp.

Step 25

Place “Water Splash 5” on the chest of the horse with some water coming out from his mouth.

Step 26

“Water Splash 6” goes on the belly. Notice that this has a gray color and it is not very bright. That’s because we need something to fill in that big area and a very bright splash would be in conflict with all the other splashes.

Step 27

“Water Splash 7” goes on the rear foot. It adds some nice random water drops

Step 28

“Water Splash 1” goes on the back and on the head

Step 29

Make a duplicate of “Water Splash 1” and use Warp to fit it on the head

Step 30

Duplicate the original “Water Splash 1” again and place it somewhere on the chest to fill in the gaps. It looks too bright so use a Curves Adjustments to lower it’s brightness (drag the curve downwards).

Step 31

Now that the water horse it is done let’s put the original harness over. To do this turn off all the layers except the original background layer and using the pen tool select all the bigger parts of the gear

Step 32

After you’ve finished with paths press Ctrl + Enter to make selection from path. Now press Ctrl + J to make a new layer from selection and now you should have the harness on a new layer.

Step 33

Move the harness layer above all layers then turn back on the visibility of all the layers. You should have something like the image below. It looks pretty nice but it not quit complete yet. Because we can see objects through water some of the harness on the other side of the horse should be partially visible too. The problem is that we don’t know how the back of the harness looks and we don’t have any photo reference of the same harness. In these situations it is good to remember that the elements in a photoshoped should look real but they don’t necessarily have to be from a real reference. When you’re doing a scene like that you’re selling an illusion so any tricks to make the illusion look real will do.

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