From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

951 Creating a candy cane rhinoceros in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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951 Creating a candy cane rhinoceros in Photoshop

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- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Well, it's that time of year, the time of year I celebrate the holiday season inside Photoshop with that most cherished of all holiday traditions, the application of a seamless candy cane pattern to a vector base rhinoceros. Best news of all. You don't have to draw the rhino. Photoshop draws it for you. Why? Why in the world would you do such a thing? It could be a giraffe. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final candy cane rhino, just so you have a chance to see it open inside Photoshop. We're going to start off inside this composition right here, which features a background illustration from the Dreamstime image library, about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. The rhino, by the way, comes to us from Photoshop. And so, with the Dreamstime layer selected here inside the layers panel, I'll press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac, to get rid of it. And now, what you want to do is go to the Window menu and choose the Shapes command. And by the way, this assumes that you're working inside Photoshop 2020 or later. I happen to be working inside Photoshop 2021. And that's going to bring up the Shapes panel as we're seeing right here. You should see a folder called Wild Animals. In which case, twirl it open by clicking on its so-called twirly triangle, and there's the rhino right there. Just go ahead and grab that guy and drag it and drop it any place in the image window, and then hide that Shapes panel. All right, now, when you first place a shape, Photoshop gives you the option of scaling and transforming it. And so, the first thing I'm going to do is right click on that rhinoceros and choose Flip Horizontal so that we can flip him like so. And what we're trying to do is match the match me layer, which is that white rhinoceros. And so, I'm going to scale this guy like so, and it should scale proportionally, by the way. If not, just go ahead and turn on this link icon up here in the Options bar. And I ultimately came up with the height value. It's important you change the height to 331%. That's going to change the width value to negative 331, because the shape is flipped. I'm also going to select the X-value just by clicking on that X and changing it to 1405. And then, I'm going to tab to the Y-value and change it to 1057, just happens to work out nicely. And if you're working along with me, you want to apply these same values, as well. And so, I'll just go ahead and press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, in order to accept that change. And the reason for this is, that way, this snow layer nicely aligns with the animal. All right, I'm going to select the match me layer and press the backspace key, or the delete key on the Mac, to get rid of it. And I'm going to rename this layer just plain Rhino. I don't want it to be Rhino1 because there will be no Rhino2. All right, now what you want to do is go to the Window menu and choose the Patterns command to bring up the Patterns panel. And if you were working with me last week, you should see this tile pattern called Good Candy. If not, you can just go ahead and open this file right here, and then go to the Edit menu and choose Define Pattern and name the pattern, Good Candy. And that's all there is to it. All right, but I've already created it. So I'll switch back to the white rhino, and I will drag and drop the pattern onto the rhino, like so, in order to fill him automatically. Now, if you look closely, you're going to see that we have this black stroke. Not sure if that's going to be applied by default to your rhino, but we don't want it. So I'll go ahead and select that black arrow tool, which Photoshop calls the Path Selection tool, even though it has a keyboard shortcut of A for arrow. Then notice this Stroke option right here. Click on that black stroke, if indeed you see that swatch, and change it to no color, so that we have no stroke. Then, just go ahead and double click on the thumbnail for the rhino layer, here inside the Layers panel. And let's go ahead and take the Scale value down to 50 is what I'm looking for. You can play around with the Angle value if you want to, but that's very possibly going to deliver some jagged results. Up to you. You can try it out. I'm noticing a break right here at this location. Your results may vary. In any case, I'm going to leave the Angle value set to zero degrees and click OK. Now, the rhino's looking pretty flat at this point, so I'm going to add a couple of layer effects. But first, I'm going to double click on the Patterns tab in order to collapse that panel so I have more room to work here inside the Layers panel. Then I'll click on the fx icon and choose Gradient Overlay is what I'm looking for. Now in my case, it just applies a kind of white to white gradient. Obviously, that's not what I want, but it might be a good place to start. And so, I'll just go ahead and click on that white gradient ramp right there to bring up the Gradient Editor dialog box. And then, I'll double click on this first color stop. So the color stops are below the ramp. The opacity stops are located above. And so, I'll double click on this guy right here, and I'm going to set the hue value to zero, that's just fine, which is going to give me red. I'll take the saturation value up to 100 and I'll set the brightness value to 33, so that we have a dark red, like so. Then I'll click OK. I only need one color stop. And so, I'm going to grab this guy and drag it and drop it down to get rid of it. And that way, we have a solid red gradient, which may at first seem crazy, but now we're going to modify the opacity stops. Notice the one over here on the right is set to 100%. That's fine. I want the one on the left, which is also set to 100% in my case, I want to set it to zero, like so, so that the gradient fades from transparency to opacity. At which one, I'll click OK to accept that change. And now, I'll change the Style from Linear to Radial so that we have a bright spot in the middle of the rhino. An Angle value of 90 degrees is just fine, but I am going to change the Blend Mode to Multiply in order to burn in that gradient. And I'm going to take the opacity value down to 50%, like so. All right, now I want to assign an Inner Shadow. That's going to cast a kind of shadow underneath the snow right here, and notice that the blend mode is Multiply. It should be set that way for you, as well. I'm going to click on the color, and these are the values I'm looking for, a hue value of zero degrees, once again red, a saturation of 100% and a brightness of 50%. At which point, I'll click OK. I've got the opacity value cranked up to 100%, which is exactly what I want. Notice that my global angle is set to 60 degrees. Again, that's just fine, but I'm going to set the Distance to 100 pixels, leave the Choke value set to zero, and then I'll take the Size value up to 60 pixels in order to produce this effect here. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to accept those changes. And actually, that looks like garbage and that's because I forgot a very important layer effect. So I'll go ahead and click on the fx icon once again and choose Bevel & Emboss this time around to bring up this complex set of options. Now these are the default settings, by the way. I do want a Style of Inner Bevel. Techniques should be Smooth. A depth of 100% is just fine. Direction wants to be Up. However, I'm going to set the Size value to 100 pixels and I'll leave Soften set to zero. Notice that, thanks to my Global Light settings, the Angle value is 60 degrees and the Altitude is 30 degrees. That's going to work out just fine, but we want a more exciting Gloss Contour. So I'm going to change it from Flat, as it is now, to this guy right here, Ring, not Ring Double, just plain old Ring. It's going to do quite nicely. And now, notice that we have both a Highlight and a Shadow. We don't need the Highlight, so I'm just going to take the Opacity value down to 0%. We're going to use the Shadow, instead. And so, I'm going to click on that Shadow swatch, which by default is black. And I'm going to drag this circle to the top left corner of the field to change it to white, then I'll click OK. Now you want the Shadow mode to be not Screen, which you can try if you like, but I want a harsher highlight, and so I'm going to go with Linear Dodge. And so, I'm using the Shadow in order to create the highlight, and that's because Direction is set to Up. If I set it to Down, I'd use the Highlight to create the highlight. And of course, you can experiment with these settings to your heart's content, but this is what I came up with. An Opacity of 50% is just fine. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK to apply that change. And now, especially if I were to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool up here at the top of the Toolbox, which will hide the Path Outline, we end up with some very nicely lit and shaded candy, and it just happens to be in the shape of a rhinoceros. If you like, you can switch to a camel or a kangaroo or a giraffe, or what have you. And that is how you create a highly desirable, candy cane rhinoceros here inside Photoshop. Creating a candy cane rhinoceros is a lot trickier than you might think, which is why, if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have two, count them, two followup movies. In the first, we warp the candy cane pattern around the rhino like some kind of crazy gift wrap. In the second, I'll show you how to add these rippling, reflective shadows, using a couple of smart filters, Ripple and Wave. Looking forward to next week? Well, because of the holidays, my good friends at LinkedIn Learning have the week off, as do you, but I'll definitely be back in 2021. Deke's Techniques each and every week, except next week. Keep watching.

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