Photoshop Vector Tutorial

By: Brian Fitzpatrick

In this tutorial I will try and teach you the basics of vector art in adobe photoshop. We are going to turn this image into this using photoshops pen tool. Before we get started dont worry if you cant pick up on how to use the pen tool straight away, it takes a few minutes to get the hang of it. When choosing a picture you want to vectorize make sure its interesting, has nice enough lighting and plenty of different colours. The picture i'm using isn't the most professional or epic photo but its decent enough to make a nice vectorized version.

Step one

Open photoshop and open the picture of your choice. Do anything you can to enhance the pic to make things easier. I usually like to double the image size so that the final image will be twice the resoloution as the original but you dont have to do this.

Step Two

Select the pen tool and make sure its on the paths mode and set to "add to path area". Now lets create the basic shapes and colours of the image. Create a new layer and zoom in on the area youre working on(in my case the skin areas) and choose a point where you're going to start. Just click on that area to mark the start of your path and then move to the next area of the object where it curves and click and hold on that point. You will see that you can curve the line while holding the mouse button but this will also effect the shape of the line in between the current point and the next one. Usually this isnt too much of a problem but if it is you can always hold Alt while altering the curve to just adjust the outer curve only. If this all sounds gibberish to you then hopefully this video( pentool.mov ) will help explain how to use the pen tool. After you get the whole way around your object click on the first point to join the end and start points to form one continuous line.

Step Three

If your object is divided around the picture(like how my skin layer is two arms and the head) then once you finish one line go and start the other one by doing the same thing in step two. Once you have all of the object selected, choose the main colour of the object and then select the path selection tool. Now right click and choose fill path and make sure its set to the same options as shown in the image. Click ok and your path should be filled with that colour. Now you can delete the path by right clicking and choosing delete path.

Step Four

Now move onto the next object of your choice and repeat steps two to three(make sure you remember to create a new layer). Do this for the rest of your image except dont worry if you have a complicated background, you can simplify it or just replace it with a single background colour later on.

Step Five

Now its time for the shading. You can do this by eye or you can simply add a posterize effect to the layers to use as a guideline for the shades. To do it this way just right click on the background layer and make a duplicate layer and place it on top of the layer you wish to shade. Now hold Alt and click in between the duplicate layer and the layer you want to shade. This creates a mask for the duplicate layer as you can see. Now desaturate the duplicate and add the posterize effect found in image>adjustments( I chose 2 levels to keep it simple). Click on the layer you want to shade and add a new layer. Using a darker version of the original layer colour make a path around the darkest area of the posterized image and fill them like in step three. After you fill your path you are going to need to hide or delete the duplicate layer to see the new shading. If you chose more than two levels for the posterize effect just simply make another layer with a darker or lighter colour than the last layer.

Step Six

Do the same to all layers(or at least the ones you feel need to be shaded) and you should hopefully end up with a nice looking digital image like I did. Remember that these are just the basics and you can make so much more with added time and effort. If you have any problems with the tutorial post it in the forums and I or someone else should be able to help.