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Silhouette illustration is a trend in today’s design community that has become very popular.
This form of illustration is focused on using and extracting the most basic forms of an
object and turning them into art. It can be seen everywhere from Web graphics, Flash
movies, and magazine ads, to full-blown TV ads. Although simple, silhouette illustration
can reduce an object to its most simplistic form and still convey an emotion, style, and
energy with little actual color and definition. In this tutorial I'll show how Photoshop can be used to create this type of
artwork. You'll complete an exercise that will help build your
portfolio, inspire you to add a new style to your design portfolio and push you to use
Photoshop in ways that you may not have thought of before.
What is a Silhouette?
There are many definitions for the term silhouette. However, most have two core concepts in
common. First, a silhouette generally entails the drawing of an outline of an object. Second,
the background is typically removed from this drawing leaving only the object in focus. In
short, a silhouette drawing includes only the images of the most visually important curves on
the surface of an object, person, or structure.
Creating a Golf Apparel Ad
Open Chapter_08_GolfPose_Start.psd file, available in the downloadable extremephoto.zip archive (7 MB). This file contains an image of yours truly posing with a golf club.
The first task is to visualize what areas you’d like to draw in this illustration. I decided that I wasn’t just going to trace the entire outline of the pose. Instead, I
felt the highlights and shadows produced by the folds in the shirt conveyed a certain sense
of motion and I wanted to re-create them. A common question when I discuss this technique
is how to discern those details. Practice is definitely one of the ways, but another
way is to use the adjustment tools right within Photoshop to help spark your creativity. By
manipulating the reference image and reducing the amount of colors, you’ll begin to see
patterns that can help when trying to create your own artwork. Follow along to see one
example.
Click once on the ORIGINAL POSE layer to make it active. Then, click on the New
Adjustment Layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette. Choose Posterize
from the list that appears.
Note that adjustment layers are a great alternative to using the Image . Adjustments
menu. When applying an adjustment through the menu commands, the changes to the
image are permanent. Using an adjustment layer allows you to go back and change these
settings (or hide the adjustment layer completely) at any time. This action will present you with the Posterize dialog
box.
The Posterize
command lets you specify the number
of tonal levels (or brightness values)
for each channel in an image,
and then maps pixels to the closest
matching level. For example, choosing
two tonal levels in an RGB image
gives six colors: two for red, two for
green, and two for blue.
Change the Levels setting to 3.
This will reduce the number of
tonal levels within the image.
As you can see, the image has been reduced to only a few colors. Now you can begin to
see some patterns and definable shapes taking place within the image. Notice how the
back, much of the face, and the hat become almost totally black. It’s the highlights on the
hat and face and the folds and stretch marks on the shirt that attract your eye. By drawing those highlight shapes and filling them with a light color on top of a dark background,
this shows that the golfer pose would still be distinguishable as a silhouette.
We’ll create the illustration using
shape layers. Select the Pen tool and
be sure Shape Layers button is
selected in the tool options bar. Also,
press the D and X keys to set your
foreground color to white.
Now draw or trace the highlight areas
along the shirt up to the shoulder. It
doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, I
suggest that it’s not. Just follow the
basic shapes, but also allow your
instincts to take over and feel free to
stray if you see an opportunity. When you’re done, name this layer SHIRT.
If the white foreground color of the shape layer is preventing you from seeing
the reference photo beneath, just reduce the opacity of the layer to around 20%.
You should still see some of the white, but you’ll also see the reference below.
Repeat this process for the face, keeping in mind that
you’ll only draw the front highlighted area. Also note
that part of the nose doesn’t have any light shining on it,
so you’ll want to draw around it. Name this layer FACE.
Next, draw the hat. After experimenting, I found that
when I drew that hat based off of the original highlights,
it didn’t look much like a hat. So, I’ve taken more artistic
liberty here and added some areas that didn’t appear as
highlights to retain more of its shape.
Next, draw the ear.
Now draw the hands and the arms. No need
to get too detailed here. Just some basic
free-formed shapes will work fine.
Last, draw the golf club. After reviewing my
golf stance, I thought my club was pointing
down a little too much so I also straightened
it a bit.
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