Pearls

Now, as you can see, our pearl’s starting to get a little depth to it.

Now it’s time for a little brushing and blurring and feathering - On my!

5. Create a new layer and grab your paintbrush. Select the 5px feathered brush, and set the foreground color to black. Now brush a thick, black blob that roughly follows the curve of the pearl, just inside of the perimiter of our object.

6. Now go to Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur and enter an amount of 3.

7. Ctrl+Click on this layer to select it. Fill this selection with black 3 times.

8. Duplicate the layer and hit Ctrl+I to invert the colors. Hit Ctrl+E to merge it to the previous layer.

9. Ctrl+Click on the main pearl layer to load the selection and hit Ctrl+Shift+I to invert the selection. Keeping the shadow/hilight layer active, hit delete to get rid of the excess fuzziness outside of the pearl.

10. For me, that main dark spot’s a little strong, so let’s go to Image - Adjust - Hue/Saturation and set the Lightness to +25.

11. Finally let’s add a little hint of color, in this case, pink. Create a new layer above the other two and fill it with a dark pink tone. I’m using #9E005D. Set the layer mode to Color and the opacity to 40%. Now, if you want to change the color of your pearl, all you have to do is change this one layer. Darker hues will work better than lighter ones.

There you have it, one pearl!

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Added Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 8:58 pm under Drawing & Painting.