Design a stylish dripping smiley in Photoshop part 1

A fun graphic design tutorial, a bit longer but still quite easy to follow. We will end up with a stylish looking, ink dripping smiley face. This is part one of the tutorial.

Create a new document.

File, New.

Set a lighter orange-brown color as a foreground color and a darker version for a background color (see picture).

Simply click the foreground icon and then background icon to set the colors.

Choose the Gradient Tool.

Set the Radial Gradient option (see picture).

Create a gradient by clicking and holding in the middle of the document and dragging the mouse towards the edge of the document (see picture).

You can repeat this step as much as you want.

Now right-click the Background layer and choose Layer From Background...

In the menu click File, Artistic and choose Film Grain...

Choose the same settings as I did and click OK.

Click here to download the old paper texture.

Save it to your computer.

Then click File and choose Place.

Open the Dreevoo_com_old_paper_texture.jpg image you just loaded.

The old paper texture is now placed on your document and a new layer has been created.

Resize the paper by dragging its sides so it will fit/cover the document.

Press Enter when done.

Set the old paper layer blending mode to Lighten and its Opacity to about 35%.

Create a new layer (see picture).

Choose the Line Tool.

Choose the Fill Pixels option in the toolbar under the menu and set the line Weight to 30 px (see picture).

Press D to select the black foreground color and draw a line at the top of the document.

Draw another line so you will get the X sign.

Let's now start drawing a smiley face.

Now choose the Ellipse Tool.

Draw a circle by clicking, holding and dragging the mouse.

Hold Shift while dragging your mouse to create a perfect circle.

Create a new layer (see step 11).

Now choose the Elliptical Marque Tool.

And create a selection similar to mine.

This will be the eyes.

Again, hold the Shift key in order to create a perfect circle selection.

Press Delete key to delete the selection.

Do the same with the second eye, only make it a bit bigger (see picture).

Now the mouth. Instead of the Pen Tool you can use the Free Selection tool as well. I recommend the Pen Tool though, it makes the curve drawing much easier.

If you are not quite sure how to create a selection using the Pen Tool, click here.

Create a path similar to mine ...

... right click the path and choose Make Selection...

A selection has been created, press Delete key to delete it.

Click here for the part 2 of the tutorial.