Draw Pansy Clipart in Photoshop

My most favorite graphics are always the flowers. In large part, they're my favorite because they look like they should be so difficult to create - and yet, if you know the tools to use, they're actually very easy.

This guide will help you create colorful, lovely pansy clipart in Photoshop. You won't need any special plug ins, filters, shapes, or anything else. What you will need is Adobe Photoshop, version 7 or higher. This tutorial is being written using Photoshop CS3, so some tools may be located in different spots if you're using an older version of the software - but they're all there, I promise.

Drawing Pansy Clipart - The Steps

1. New Canvas - Open Photoshop, create a new canvas (File, New) that is sized about 500 x 500 pixels, in RGB mode, with a white background.

2. Set Colors - Your basic colors can be anything that you like. I'm going with a standard purple pansy, so have set my foreground color to hex #9b8695 and my background color to #836a7f.

3. Circle Shape - Use your circle shape tool (it's very, very important that you use the circle shape, not the marquee - if you don't see the circle shape tool, right-click your square shape tool and select the circle from the list) and draw a circle on your canvas. This is the start of a petal. DO NOT rasterize this layer yet.

4. Warp Transform - We're going to make our petal look a bit more like a pansy petal using the warp transform tool. Click "Edit", choose "Transform Path", and then click "Warp". The transformation handles you get on this tool are different than any other transform you've seen in Photoshop - and with good reason. You can move every single handle, as well as the individual squares in the grid, in any direction that you want.

What we're going for is a basic petal that is pointed (sort-of) at the bottom, and wider and flatter at the top. See Illustration 01 for reference.

5. Duplicate & Rotate - With our basic petal made, we want to make 4 more petals. A pansy has a total of 5 petals, with the one at center top being the one in the very back. So, right-click your petal's layer (still don't rasterize!) and choose "Duplicate Layer". Repeat this 4 times, so that you have 5 petal layers.