Tools of the Trade Class

This is what we will create:

1. Create a new 400px x 400px document at 72dpi in Photoshop
2. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool (second one down) create a circle in the center of your document. You might have to look under the rectangular marquee tool to find the elliptical marquee tool.

Photoshop Tip: Holding the “shift” key will create a perfect circle. Holding the “option” key will create a circle from the center instead of the upper left hand corner. As long as you are in one of the selection tools (marquee tool, lasso tool, or magic wand) you can move your selection around by placing your cursor within your selection.

3. Pick a yellow color. You can pick a color by using the color swatches at the bottom of the tool palette or by selecting a color in the color or swatches palette

4. Create a new layer and call it “sun”. You can rename a layer by double clicking directly on the words “Layer 1”

5. Make sure your “sun” layer is selcted. “Edit” > “Fill”. In the dialogue box that appears make sure it’s set to “use: Foreground Color” and click “OK”.
6. Now we will create our black outline. Go “Edit” > “Stroke”. For this exercise, I set the width to “8px” and clicked on the color box to change the color to “black”. I also changed the location to “center”. Then click OK.
7. Now we can deselect our selection by using the key command “command+d”

8. We will now use the brush tool (8^th tool down) to create our sunrays. Do not confuse the brush tool with the “History Brush Tool”.

9. Select the Brush tool, and you will notice on the top options bar a place that says “brush” that you can click and get different brush options. This is how you select different brush types, sizes, and options. A soft edge brush is a brush with fuzzy edges, a hard edge brush is one with solid edges. There are also add different brushes to your default brushes by using the little fly-out menu.

10.  For this exercise, we are going to select a 19pt, hard edged brush
11.  Now simply paint your rays where you wish them to go
12.  Next I’m going to make another layer called “face” to paint my sun’s face on
13.  On the face’s layer I’m going to paint my sun’s eyebrows and nose on using a 10pt black hard edged brush
14.  The eyes are done with a blue 20pt hard edged brush, and finally the lips are made with a red 10pt hard edged brush

Photoshop Tip – An easy way to change just the size of the brush is using the “open bracket/open brace” and “close bracket/close brace” keys.

15.  Lastly we are going to add a little cheek color. The cheeks are a 40pt soft edge brush, but I changed the tool’s opacity to 37%.
16. Now you’re all set! Feel free to add a background or anything else you would like!!