Get Sticky

By TipSquirrel

Yesterday WordPress started playing up and it doesn’t seem to want to behave again today. If you know why it doesn’t want to put the images where I want them, please let me know. Anyhoo, here’s today’s bit;

Out Now

Podcast

Photoshop User TV: Episode 189

Scott, Dave and Matt are all in the studio this week with three tutorials and some sound effects of their own added in.

Tuesday Tip – Make a Sticker

Looking over the shelves of magazines this morning I noticed that many of them had a ‘sticker’ on the front. Not a real sticker, but what was supposed to look like one.

Many of them were pretty basic, just a circle with a small drop shadow, but one had a little more. Good Housekeeping had a ‘sticker’ that looked like it was starting to peel off and curl over. Here’s my version;

This is how I made it;

1. First I selected the elliptical marquee tool and, holding down the shift key to keep proportions, drew a circle.

2. I want the top to be flat, so I selected the rectangular marquee and holding down Alt key I draw a rectangle that will, because of the Alt key, remove this from the original circle selection. This might take a few goes if you haven’t done this before. Just remember you have Ctrl+Z to undo if you go wrong.

3. I filled the modified circle with a bright yellow.

4. Now, using the move tool I can move the selection up to where I want the overlap to be. Then using the same Alt select technique I did in number 2, I remove part of the selection I don’t want.

5. Next, on a new layer, I filled the selection with a slightly darker yellow.

6. Next I need a shadow under the curl, so I’ll use the layer style. You can get to it by double clicking on the layer in the layer palette.

7. Now I have a problem. I don’t want the drop shadow all round. So I’m going to make the shadow into it’s own layer using one of my favourite things. From the menu I chose; Layer > Layer Style > Create Layer.

8. Now I have the shadow on it’s own layer and I can use the eraser tool to erase the shadow from the top of the curl.

9. Now, back on the curl layer I lock the transparency. This means that anything I do to this layer will only take effect on pixels that are already filled.

10. Using the Dodge tool with a low opacity I click the left of the curl and then shift and click the right to make a highlight. Shift clicking makes the line of dodge. Straight. I went over it a couple of times until I was happy.

11. It looks a bit straight, so I selected all the used layers and pressed Ctrl+T so that I could transform the layers. In this case I put my mouse outside a corner so that I could rotate it a little.

12. Finally I added the text, between the original circle layer and the drop shadow layer

13. Lastly, I added a tiny drop shadow to the first circle layer just to give it a bit of depth.

14. And there we are. An easy sticker.