| Making the shield |
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In this tutorial, we’re going to make a shape that resembles the shield. Discuss this tutorial on our forum! Open a new document in Photoshop and make the square canvas (I’ll go with 500x500px). Paint it black. Make the rulers visible because we need to draw the guide lines out of them. Just click on a ruler and drag the lines in this pattern. Whenever you need to draw something symmetrical, use these lines.
You can always hide these guide lines, just press ctrl+; and unhide them by pressing again that combination. Other way to do it is through View / Show / Guides. They tend to get in the way.
Pick the Pen tool and draw a triangle. Make sure you’ve closed the path. Now add 3 anchor points on places where triangle sides intersect the guide lines.
Now pick the Direct selection tool. Select one added anchor point and while holding shift tap the arrow on keyboard few times to move it outwards. Of course, for left one tap the left arrow, for right, the right one and for the top anchor point tap the up arrow. This way symmetry is preserved.
Next thing you should do is to add additional two anchor points near the top of a triangle. Again, with the Direct selection tool push those two inward a bit, just to add some curve. I also lowered a bit two side anchor points.
Create a new layer (Layer / New / Layer…), pick the pen tool, right click on the path, choose Make selection… and click ok in a dialog box that appears.
Select two shades of gray for the foreground/background (I used #e3e3e3 and #8f8f8f) and with the gradient tool draw diagonally inside a selection.
Again create a new layer, go to Select / Modify / Contract…, put 10px in Contract by field and click ok.
Invert the foreground and the background color (press X on the keyboard) and with the gradient tool draw diagonally inside a selection.
Once more, create a new layer, go to Select / Modify / Contract…, put 10px in Contract by field and click ok. Now select lighter and darker shade of orange for the foreground/background. Pick the radial gradient tool and draw diagonally inside a selection with lighter part in the top left.
Select a previous, middle, layer, press ctrl and click on the layer to select its shape. Create a new layer and fill it with white. New layer should be right above the middle layer. Go to Select / Modify / Contract… and set it on 1px. After that press delete. That will leave only 1px wide, thin line which will separate the two metallic layers. Here we can see that two gradients used in opposite directions can emulate illuminated surface.
Select an orange layer and choose the Blending options. Use the Inner and the Outer shadow with these values.
And that is it! Feel free to experiment on your own.
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