How to paint in Photoshop using a mouse

Welcome to my very first tutorial in which I am going to show you how to do a nice looking paintings using just a mouse. Halloween is coming soon so let's paint a pumpkin:-)

Step 1 - The Outline

Create an outline of the pumpkin in Illustrator (or use mine).
Open up Photoshop and create a New Document with a white background.
Put your outline into this new document (have both outline.ai and new document opened in Photoshop and drag and drop the outline into this new document with "move tool (v)").
This should create a new layer. Name it outline, set blending to multiply and opacity to 60% - 70%.

Step 2 - The basic colour

Create a new layer under the outline layer and name it orange.
Choose a basic colour of your pumpkin (I chose R:255 G:120 B:0).
Click on the brush tool, from the list of available brushes choose Rough round bristle, leave blend mode to normal for now, but change opacity to 50%. Fill the entire area of the pumpkin with only one stroke.

Now that's your basic colour on which you can add more colour, shades, lights and more details.

Step 3 - Casting shadows

And now we are going to create a basic round shape of the pumpkin.

Set the mode of your brush to multiply and change opacity to 10% - 15% depending on how rough you want your painting look.
Create many many brushstrokes. Just point, click, drag shortly and let off and do this in a really fast pace all over your pumpkin. Do more of them in the areas you want to have darker and less in the areas you want lighter.

In a few moments we should get something like this:

As you can see, wee can use a little more shadows in the darker area. Choose a darker tone of orange colour (I chose R:187 G:88 B:1), set the opacity to 7% and continue coloring the pumpkin.

Step 4 - Casting reflections

We have a pretty good looking pumpkin now right? But not only the shades make our pumpkin look three-dimensional, it's also the light reflections.

Make another layer above the orange layer and name it reflections.
Change the brush colour to white, set mode back to normal and start casting the reflections with a lot of brushstrokes.
If needed, you can use the large eraser brush with hardness set to "0" and soften the reflections.

Step 5 - Finishing, postprocessing...

So, the basics of painting in Photoshop are pretty much covered. You can get rid of the unwanted brushstrokes around the outline using Polygonal Lasso tool or whatever you prefer. Now you know everything you need to continue painting other shapes on your pumpkin.

If you cast shadows close to the reflections you can give your pumpkin even more three-dimensional look. Give it a nice matching colour background, play with it, experiment... Since this is my first tutorial, I'd be more than happy for your feedback.

Happy Halloween!

Marko

Ready pumpkin...

...and two Halloween versions:

Comments

jose

very good thanks

Valerio

Not much to say: simply amazing!

Randy

this tutorial was just what i needed, thank you soo much

Shawn

Fantastic! Thank you! Simple and easy to follow! :)

Dave

Good Tips! But do you have any tips on the actual drawing of the outline with a mouse? I can never do it right.

jocelyn

you are a good teacher

Emad Tad

looks nice thanks !

bdjohnson

Very nice but how did you get the "bumps" to show up on the final picture?

Diane

Yours looks way better than mine...but mine is not so bad. Thanks. I learned a lot!

Rcurtis

Thanks Marko, simple to understand and follow instead of using perplex instruction.

Joefrey

Nice Tutorial! Thanks!

ali

that was quite nice

Narendar

Great job. simply superb....

Sandra, Portugal

thank you

amluidgi

WHouaahh!!!!!!!!!!!!!

IMS

thank you very much

King james

that loos grate im hoping to bcome as good one day, just starting out. grate job.

Monika

Nice job!!! Very, very nice.

Sam

Very useful to me.. Thanks!!!

Sara

thanks! its a easy way to make coloured pics looked cool! =P

Daniel

I love it, thanks!

cameron

very nice and simple ,im going to try it now thank you

Dani

Nice. I used a scribbly brush for a rough crayon/chalk effect: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30079024@N06/2962440381/

Denis

It was very simple and very useful. Thanks

Pete Nicholls

Why not select the background after step 1 and save it as a selection. Then you will have the selection to recall when you want to erase the strokes outside the pumpkin
Marko comments:
Yes sure, why not. I was just trying to keep this tutorial as simple as possible - just this particular "painting technique" oriented.

vk050

i was looking for that tutorial. thank you very much! :)

Richard

Perfect. Looks simply, I will try it...
Thanks

Tom

Nice, thanks!