Custom Painting Butterflies in Photoshop

The whole concept of taking Photoshop beyond photography is something that has made Photoshop a cultural icon - it has spawned a whole group of millions of people who obsessively play with Photoshop to see how far they can stretch its limits, and in the process they have redefined how we view art. No longer can we look at a photograph without wondering “Is this real, or was it Photoshopped?”. Painting in Photoshop is just one aspect of this whole craze, and we’re going to hitch a ride on the bandwagon and learn how to paint butterflies in this tutorial.

You can create these butterflies in any full-version of Photoshop (not Elements) from 7.0 through the current CS2. There are no special tools or plug-ins to download - everything you need is already present in Photoshop.

You might want to reference Illustration 02, which features full screenshots of the steps involved. Do keep in mind, though, that I'm able to go much more in-depth in this article than the image-version of the tutorial.

One: Create a new canvas (File, New), sized at 500 x 500 pixels with a white background. Then,  set your foreground color to black and grab your custom shape tool (It’s the one that hides behind  the rectangle tool. Right-click the rectangle shape tool, and choose the one that looks like a big  splat). Look under your toolbar, and you’ll see a drop-down menu with a picture in it. Click that  drop-down, and then click the arrow that points out. You’ll be given another menu. From this menu
choose “Nature”. This loads the nature shape set. Finally, select the butterfly shape - we’ll be using  this as a reference. Drag the butterfly shape out on your canvas.