Creating Smileys

This tutorial will teach you how to make emotions for use.. Anywhere really. Although these are not the same quality as, for example, the emotions that the IPB forum software uses, they still look exceptional, especially for home-made products. First off, we open up a new document. For this tutorial, I will use a 300width by 300height canvas, with a white background.

When you create your new image, start off by making a new layer. Before doing anything else, right click on the marquee icon (the square made of dotted lines in the upper-left corner of your tools window), and from the menu that pops out, chose the Elliptical Marquee tool.

Now that you have done this, hold shift and make a small circle on your newly created layer.

This will, more or less, be the size of your smiley. You are now ready to fill the smiley in. In true emotion fashion, we will be making it yellow. Select your gradient tool (by pressing G, or right clicking the Paint bucket icon, and choosing the gradient option from the menu that pops out.

Now you will most likely notice that the bar at the top of your screen has changed. On it, there are quite a few variables which we could take advantage of, but we are only going to be changing two today. The first is the actual gradient itself. For this demonstration, I have used hex value #fff600 for the left-most section, and #e9d130 for the right-most. You can edit them yourself by double-clicking the gradient on the top, then editing the values of the bottom arrows on each side of the gradient.

Next, we are going to change the type of gradient we are using. the default gradient (on the far left) is most likely currently selected on your copy of Photoshop. We want to use the one right next to it, (to the right), the Radial Gradient. After clicking the radial gradient, we must now make sure that our gradient options are correct. Your bar should now look something like this:

Click to enlarge

Now that the gradient options are correct, fill in the circle by dragging your gradient cursor from top-left to bottom-right. You may choose from where to where you wish to drag your gradient, but in my opinion, this way is the best for homemade emotions. Right now, you should have something like this:

This will be the foundation for your smiley. Now, double click the layer you have added gradient your emotion onto, and it should bring up the layer properties. If this doesn't work, you can right click it instead and choose 'Layer Properties' Once here, click on the 'Stroke' tab. The default stroke colour is red, you may change it to any colour you wish, but I recommend black, the same way you changed your gradient, by double-clicking the red bar on the tab and selecting black either by dragging the selection cursor there, or by typing in hex value #000000. Please note that the # is added by default, so you only need to type 000000. After doing that, play around with the settings in the tab. These are the ones I used:

With them, I got this result:

It is now possible to add facial features and expressions. To do this, use the elliptical marquee tool from before, and fill your chosen features with a darker grey for best results. I was able to create this using only 3 passes with the elliptical marquee tool: