Ok, so in our last lesson we got through opening a file, setting up our pencil and erasor, picking our colors, zooming and saving. Now we are going to get a little deeper into working with photoshop by using layers.
Let's begin by opening up the blank strawberry gif again.
When I am working with pixels, I like my things to be very big so I zoom in and out a LOT. So, lets open up the strawberry and zoom in to where we feel comfortable working. I have mine zoomed in to 700% here:
Let's take just a moment right quick and save our graphic as a .psd file while we are working on it. I like to save often in case of lock ups, or crashes or someone else coming along and closing what you are working on. If you need to, refer back to lesson one and save your image now as a .psd file. :)
Got it saved? Ok, good, now before I go any further in a graphic, I always create a new layer to start working on. This will save you SO much time later on if you decide you don't like something or want to change something. This also saves the origional image you are working on so you have it at any time. So lets do that now. On your layers pallet at the bottom, click on the little icon that says 'new layer' when you mouse over it. You can see it here:
Now you will notice that we have something that says "Layer 2" We are going to do the outline of the strawberry on Layer 2, so lets go ahead and change the name in the layer pallet so we will keep things organized. This is a good habit to get into doing and you will thank yourself later on when you have 50+ layers with names instead of layer 1 - layer 50 lol. So, to change the name it is very simple, we will just double click on the current name that says Layer 2 and it will bring up a place for you to delete it and retype something else, like this:
I'm going to call mine strawberry, you can call yours whatever you want as long as when you see it, you will know what it is. :) Like so:
Ok, now I start with my outlines, so get your colors ready, make sure that the strawberry layer is highlighted, indicating that you are on that layer and go ahead and pixel in the outline of the strawberry on the new layer that we made (mine was called strawberry) do not do the leaves yet, JUST the strawberry:
Now let's make a new layer like we did before and this time we will name it 'leaves'
Once again, make sure that layer is selected (it will show up as a diffrent shade than the other layers in the layer pallet) and lets outline our leaves and the stem.
Once we have our leaves done, let's create a new layer and call it something like 'strawberry inner' or something like that, make sure that layer is selected and we will fill in the inside of the strawberry:
You may also notice I made another new layer called Seeds, that is so I could fiddle around with them till I got them how I liked it without having to mess up what I had already done with the rest of the shading. : ) I do that a lot when I am working on something.
Something else you can do is Right Click on a layer and select Duplicate. This will make a new layer exactly like the one you copied. This is great if you want to try some things out but don't want to have to re-do the whole thing you just did. Here is what it looks like:
Now lets work on the leaves, create another new layer and call it 'leaves inner' or something along those lines.
And here we are.. does it look finished? If not go back and play with it some more till you have it how you want it. Once you are done, choose the 'Save for Web' option that we talked about in the first lesson and now you have a transparent gif strawberry! Congratulations! :)
