Stock Illustration Tutorial - 9 Steps to a Woman's Face in Photoshop

There is little more satisfying than creating a graphic completely from scratch. It is a great feeling of accomplishment - and the graphics you create yourself don't have pesky little copyright issues attached to your use of them. In this guide, I'll help you create a fashion-style woman, a stock illustration.

You will need Photoshop, any version from 7 - CS2 will work. Anything else? Nope, just a little bit of patience. You may want to reference the illustrations attached to this article as you go along. Each "part" is in a separate graphic to make the tutorial (hopefully) a bit easier to read and follow.

Part One - The Base

One: Create a new canvas (File, New) ... sized at about 500 x 500 pixels. You can work at a larger size if you’re comfortable, and size it down as needed. The idea is to work at as large of a size as you can, because when you size it down later, it will keep the quality. Make the background of your canvas white, and make sure it’s in RGB mode.

Two: One thing that’s important to know about all my tutorials is that I try to offer the easiest route,and the one that allows you the easiest customization later. There are always other ways of doing things - not necessarily better or worse, but this is my way.

What we’re going to do first is create a gradient that will represent our illustration woman’s hair. To do this and keep with my easy goal, first duplicate your background layer (right-click it and choose “Duplicate Layer”). If you double-click the layer’s text, you can change the layer name to “Hair”.

Now, set your foreground color to #c03c85 and your background color to #d27db8. Then, go to your layer styles (Layer - Layer Styles - Gradient Overlay) and choose “Gradient Overlay”. Apply the dark-to-light pink gradient. Leave all settings at default, but click the “Inverse” box.