This Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material focuses on creating the final step in our character tutorials – the shirt.  Earlier pages focused on the skin, eyes, and hair.  As with the earlier pages, this tutorial will work with any version of Photoshop that you are using, though it was made using Adobe Photoshop 7 Full Version. 

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Step 1 Before anything else, take a small brush and get the basic shape of the shirt.  Be sure to include signals (like the small wrinkle shadows shown here) which mark the movement of the shirt around the breasts.  You may also want to add the smaller details now, such as the zipper or buttons on the shirt.

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Step 2 If you are creating a shiny red material, then the base color of your shirt should be a medium maroon.  Create a new layer and color the entire base of the shirt.  Lock the pixels.

Duplicate the layer.

 

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Step 3 If you have done this in the correct order, the duplicated layer will also have locked pixels.  Paint the entire shirt white.  Then, using the same color of maroon as you used for the base of your shiny red material, add shadows to the image.  Shadows should be found at the curve of the shoulder, beside the arm, and under the breasts.  Set this Photoshop layer to Multiply.

    
It is easiest to add small amounts of shadow and use the Smudge Tool to blend.  This creates a more natural look in your shadows and gives the shirt a stretched appearance around the shadowed areas.

 

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Stage 4 Create a new layer and select a dark burgundy or plum.  Use this color to create the color and shirt seams.

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Step 5 Now you will need to move back a little.  Create another duplicate layer off of the base layer you created in step 2 of this tutorial.  Again, the pixels should still be locked.  Paint the entire layer white.  Again using the original base maroon color, add the major wrinkles.  These will be found below the shoulders, below the breasts, and where the shirt moves under the arm.  Set the layer to Multiply.

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Stage 6 Now we have gotten to the stage in this tutorial when we will make the red material shiny.  Create a new Photoshop layer and set that layer to Color Dodge.  Add highlights into the shirt.  The more blended highlights will be found above the breast and below the shoulders.  However, more distinct highlights will be found at the high point of any wrinkle.

   

The brighter the highlights around the wrinkles of the shirt, the more your silky your shiny red material will look.  Keep these distinct, rather than blending them in with a Smudge Tool or a soft brush.

Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material – Finish

This is close to the end of our 4 step Photoshop Tutorial, but we need one last detail.  As you can see, we’ve stepped away from our original sketch quite a bit.  The original sketch was simply a starting point and we made quite a few changes along the way, particularly to the outfit.  Because we differed so far from our original plan, however, we need to add in the second arm (which was not really visible in the sketch). 

 

We’ve now come to the end of Photoshop Tutorial: Shiny Red Material.  Feel free to proceed back to the skin, eyes, or hair steps.