In "Layers", you should see your blade drawn in black. Click on the eyeball icon to the left of the "Blade" layer in the "Layer" tool box. Notice that your drawing of the blade went away. Click it again and it comes back. This is how you turn layers on and off. You will see the value of this as we get more layers drawn.
Our blade looks kind of plain and simple doesn't it? It's just a simple black line drawing. Let's make it look a bit more realistic. We are going to fill the area of the blade with color. I am going to show a couple of ways to fill so you can see the difference.
First, let's just fill it with a solid color so lets select a silver-gray color like steel would be. If you look toward the bottom of the tool bar on the left, you wills see two colored boxes, one overlapping the other. The top color is the foreground color currently in use. The bottom color is the background color. Either of these can be changed and you will also see a little double arrow which switch positions of the foreground and background colors.
We will be filling the blade with the foreground color but we want a different color. Left click on the foreground color.
This will open the "Color Picker" window. I touched on this earlier but I'll go over it again. Notice the vertical rainbow colored bar in the middle of the window. This is actually slider where you can choose a range of colors. Notice the triangular arrows on either side of the bar near the top. They are between red and magenta. Now notice in the bigger colored box on the left is filled with shades of red and magenta and fades to white at the upper left and black at the lower left.
Also notice the small circle in the color box on the left. It is near the lower left corner of the color box. That is the current foreground color. See how it matches the top color on the smaller box on the right? All of the numbers on the lower right are the values of primary colors that combine to make the chosen color. We don't need to concerned with the numbers here but I just mention it in case you are curious.
Let's move the slide on the vertical rainbow colored bar, or just left click somewhere on the bar, and notice how the range of colors change in the larger color box on the left. Set the slide in the baby blue range as shown below. Now, in the color box on the left, left click in the silver gray area as shown below. Now you can see that color has been selected as the foreground color as shown in the smaller color box on the right. Click on "OK"
Now that we have the color we want, let's color our blade. First, let's turn the grid off for now. Go the "View" menu a the top of the screen, move down to "Show", and click "Grid" to turn it off.
There are a number of ways to color an object in Photoshop. One of the easiest ways is to use the "Pain Bucket Tool". Using the "Paint Bucket Tool" simply left click anywhere inside your drawing of the blade and it will fill it with your foreground color.
And now it looks more like a knife blade. Notice that it did not fill the pins holes.
If you want a more realistic look, we can use the "Gradient Tool". This will smoothly blend different colors or shades. Here, I will show you how use the "Gradient Tool" add highlights to the blade for a more realistic effect simulating the way light would naturally highlight the blade.
Notice that when you have the "Gradient Tool" selected, some new options appear on the "Options" bar at the top of the screen. The rectangular box with the drop-down arrow beside it shows what our current gradient will look like. Yes, yours looks different, we will fix that in a minute. The next five boxes on the options bar show different gradient styles. We want the first one selected (called a "Linear Gradient"). Make sure the other setting on the options bar are set as shown below: Mode: Dissolve, Opacity: 100%, Dither and Transparency are checked.
If you click on the little arrow of the drop-down menu next to the gradient on the options bar it will open a window where you can choose from a selection of pre-set gradients. Your choices will be different from what you see in my example because I have created and saved my own gradients but you should see a selection of some kind. Notice that this new window also has a little arrow at the top right. Click it.
That opens yet another menu where you can choose other sets of pre-set gradients at the bottom such as "Color Harmonies". (Your choices may vary depending on the version of Photoshop you are using.) You won't find the gradient we need here because we will use a custom gradient but I just wanted to show you what some of your options are with gradients. For now cancel out of these menus and just click in the rectangular gradient box on the options bar.
Clicking the gradient box on the options bar opens the "Gradient Editor" where can choose or modify a preset gradient. Again, your presets will look different that those shown below but that's OK.
We are going modify whatever gradient you happen to have selected. What we are concerned with here are the little pointers shown below called "color stops". These set the range of colors for your gradient. In order to have a gradient you must at have least two color stops but you can have more. Don't worry about the pointer above the gradient bar (opacity stops), only the ones below the gradient bar.
This gets a little difficult to explain but I will try my best. I think the results are worth the effort. If you left click and hold on any of the "color stops" (shown above by the red arrows) you can move them left or right along the gradient bar. You can also remove a color stop by dragging it away from the bar. You can add new color stops by clicking directly below the gradient bar or between any existing color stops.
Play around with this for a minute. Don't worry about what colors they are at this point as we will be changing them in a minute.
OK, we need 3 color stops in our gradient, one at each end of the gradient bar and one close to the middle. Add or delete color stops until you have 3 positioned something like shown above.
Now we will set the color for each f the 3 color stops which will determine how our gradient looks. Notice that when you click on any of the color stops the tip of it turns black to indicate that it currently selected. The "Color" box below shows the color set for the selected color box.
Click on the color stop at the left end of the gradient bar to select it. Now click in the color box below (click right on the color). That should open our familiar "Color Picker" window. Choose a silver gray color like steel would be as shown. Click "OK" in the "Color Picker" window. The "Color Picker" window should close but the "Gradient Editor" window should remain open.
Please follow the next steps exactly as I describe them. We have set the color for the first of our 3 color stops, the one at the left end of the gradient bar. Now we want to set the color for the other two color stops, the one in the middle of the gradient bar and the one at the right end below the gradient bar. We want the color stops at each end to be the same color and the one in the middle just a little lighter. I am going to show you a quick and easy way to do this.
Click on the middle color stop to select it. Now instead of clicking on the color box below it, move your mouse pointer onto the gradient bar itself. Notice that you pointer turns into an eyedropper icon when it is over the gradient bar. If you click anywhere on the gradient bar it will set the color under your pointer as the color for the selected box. Move you eyedropper pointer to the left end of the gradient bar and click above our first color stop. This should set the color of you middle color stop to the same color as the left color stop.
Now do the same thing for the 3rd color stop at the right end of the gradient bar. Select it, move your pointer to the left end of the gradient bar just over the 1st color stop and click. Now your "Gradient Editor" window should look something like shown below. All 3 color stops should be the same color and the gradient bar should be a solid silver gray color from end to end.
Now you are probably thinking that using the same color across the bar isn't going to make much of a gradient. You are right. We need to slightly change the middle color bar to make it a little lighter. Click the middle color stop to select it and this time click in the "Color" box below. The "Color Picker" window will show the color selected for the color stop.
Notice where the little circle is in the color box. We want to make that color just a little lighter than the other two color stops so move the circle (or just click) a little above where it is now, just a little more toward the white area as shown below. Click "OK" in the "Color Picker" window.
Now your "Gradient Editor" should look as shown below. The gradient bar should be the same silver gray color at each end but a little lighter in the middle. Click "OK" in the "Gradient Editor" and it will close.
Whew! I know all of this seems complicated especially if you are new to using Photoshop. Believe me, it does get easier the more you use it and get used to it. Once you learn it, you will have a very powerful tool that you will find a million uses for.
We are almost finished learning new tools. Almost everything else we will do in designing our knife will use the tools and techniques that we have already covered so it will move along faster and easier to finish designing and drawing our Bowie knife.
NOTE: I probably should have mentioned this earlier but better late than never. If you look under the "Edit" menu at the top of the screen, you will find "Undo", "Step Forward" and "Step Backward" commands along with the keyboard shortcuts shown to the right of each one. If you ever do something that you don't like or didn't want to do you can always "undo" or "step backward" to go back to where you were previously.
Another Note: Now is a good time to save your work. When working with any project, a good rule of thumb is to "save and save often". There is noting more maddening than spending hours working on something and then accidentally clicking the wrong thing or having a power outage and losing all of that work. I spent many hours creating this tutorial and I saved it dozens of times as I went along just to be sure I wouldn't have to do it all over again if something happened.
If you look under the "File" menu t the top of the screen you will see options to "Save" and "Save As". I will explain the difference. If you "Save" your work, it will save your project just as it is at this point and ask you to name your file. If you work on it some more and "Save" it again, it will replace your old file with the newer updated version.
"Save As" will allow you to save your work as a separate file under a different file name. Why would you want to "save as"? Let's say you complete a knife design and save it. But now you want to change something, say, put a different guard on the knife, and also want to save that version of the design. Remember, if you "save", it REPLACES the older file with the new file. If you "save as", it will save it as a separate file under a different file name so now you can have both versions of the design saved for future use.
So let's save our work at this point. You can choose either "save" or "save as" from the "File" menu. Either will open a window where you can tell the program where to save the file, what name to save it as, and what format to save it in.
At the top you will see the "Save In" box where you tell the program where to save your file on your computer's hard drive. Notice that there is a an arrow at the right end of the "Save In" box where you can open a drop-down menu and choose a location on your computer to save the file. There are also icons to the right of the box that allow you to navigate up a level in your directory or create a new folder. Remember where you save your work so you can find it again later.
At the bottom of the "Save" or "Save As" window there is a box where you can enter or change the name of your file.
Below that is the "Format" box which should currently be set to "Photoshop (*.PSD, *.PDD)". That means it will save your file as the proprietary file format that Photoshop uses and it will name the file with a ".PSD" extension at the end. It you save your work as a Photoshop (.PSD) file, when you open it again it will be exactly like you saved it with all of the layers, paths and any other features you had created. Photoshop files are typically very large files and will often take up several megabytes of your hard drive space because they require a LOT of data to be saved. If your are saving a work in progress or something that you think you might modify in the future, you should save a Photoshop (.PSD) copy.
If you are following along with this tutorial in Photoshop, go ahead and save your work in the Photoshop format now.
Notice that the "Format" box has an arrow to the right for a drop-down menu. This gives you the choice to save your work in a wide variety of formats. The most commonly used of these is JPEG (.jpg). This is a common picture file type that uses compression to reduce the size of the file. As I said above, if it is an unfinished project or something you might want to modify in the future, be sure to save a copy in the Photoshop (.PSD) file format. But you can also save another copy in another format using the "Save AS" command.
Why? As an example, when I am designing a knife for a customer I will save my design as a Photoshop file so I can modify it later if I need to. But I want to email the design to the customer for approval. I don't want to email a Photoshop file because not only would it be a HUGE email attachment but the customer might not have the Photoshop program and not be able to view it anyway. Instead, I would save a COPY as a JPEG (.jpg) file that I could email to the customer. If the customer wants changes to the design, I still have the original Photoshop file saved on my computer so I can open it and continue working with it.
If you choose to save your file in the JPEG format, it will open a "JPEG Options" window where you can choose the quality of the image in the "Image Options" box. JPEG uses a compression method to reduce the size of an image file. Compression does come with a cost in image quality. You can choose a quality level from 1 to 12. 1 would be the lowest quality image but the smallest file size. 12 would be the highest quality image but also the biggest file size (which can be very big).
I save JPEG images in a high quality (10-12) if I plan to make large high quality prints of the image. For use on the Internet or for emailing, use a quality level of 6 or 7. Remember way back at the beginning of this tutorial we talked about digital images and how they are displayed on computer screens versus prints. When viewed on a computer screen, you will see virtually no difference in quality between an image saved at quality level 12 or quality level 6. Saving it at anything above 6 or 7 just increases the file size without giving you any noticeable change in quality when viewed on the Internet or as a email attachment.
There may be times where you want to save several copies of the same image, a Photoshop file, a high quality JPEG for printing AND a lower quality JPEG to post on the Internet or email to someone. You can do all of this using the "Save As" command and save copies in different formats, quality and with DIFFERENT file names. If you save an image with the same file name it will replace the image already saved under the same file name just like the "Save" command will do. When I save both high and low quality copies of the same file I will simply add a letter or number to the file name such as "PhotoA.jpeg" and "PhotoB.jpg".
Enough about saving your files for now. Let's back to our knife design.
OK, now we are going to apply our new gradient to our knife blade. We want to apply this gradient to only the knife blade and not the entire canvas so we need to select the knife blade using the "Magic Wand Tool". Click this tool to select it and then click anywhere on the knife blade.
You should now see the knife blade outlined with hash marks to indicate that the area is active.
Now select the "Gradient Tool". Next left click and hold near the bottom of the blade and then move your mouse pointer up beyond the top of the blade as shown below.
As you move your mouse while holding down the left mouse button you will see a line extending from the starting point where you first clicked to where you have moved your mouse pointer.
You should end up with something like this (below). You can see the color of the blade gradually changing from a lighter color at the top to a darker color at the bottom much like you would see a real knife blade with light coming from overhead. If you didn't get this result or something like it remember that you can always "Undo" or "Step Backward" and try again.
When you have similar results to what I show above, choose "Deselect" from the "Select" menu.
Now you have a more realistic looking blade to build your design on. Adding details like gradients can really enhance your drawings and impress your customers. It might seem like a lot of effort just to get this relatively simple effect on the blade but after you do it for a while in Photoshop it will become almost second nature to you. Just like in making knives, the little details to make a difference.
We have covered a lot in this tutorial about Photoshop and learned to use most of the tools you will need to compete our knife design. Things will move along a little faster now since we will be repeating many of the functions we have already done to create the remaining parts of our Bowie Knife. I won't again go over the tools and menus in detail that we used up to this point. If you need to refresh your memory of how to use a particular tool, go back to the part of the tutorial where we covered it earlier.
So, let's move on with our design. Next, we will create the grind for the blade.