Browsing through Google images or the hundreds of stock photography agencies available on the web is something that has become more than a pre-requisite when you carry out (from scratch) any graphic design.

This is why posts presenting the latest and hopefully most innovative series of button, social media icons or other graphic arts are so popular among the designing community.

But sometimes, you only need to travel as far as your kids’ rooms to find what you’re looking for. Chance is your toddler(s) has(ve) every vehicle, every shape, and every animal in stock (somewhere in that mess of theirs) but as a stubborn geek, you will remain seated, and determined to find what you’re looking for on some obscure web page full of poker links, flashing ads, or less-inviting invitations to a revolutionary diet formula based on the consumption of nothing but ribs and curry sauce.

‘Google’ your kids room instead

Here’s a little habit of mine I find not only recreational, but very rewarding. I tend to use my kid’s toys to personalize my graphic designs. Not only I find it very enjoyable to use the very same items I have queued for in my local toy shop, fighting off a hundred millions screaming equivalents of my own progeniture, but it makes me happy to see my boy’s face when he finds out his favorite toy is on ‘daddy’s website’.

The Herbie example

Here’s a quick example I’d like to walk you through. A few weeks back, I intended to use a cartoon-like representation of Herbie (The famous Disney Volskwagen Beetle) on an F1-looking circuit, and decided to use my boy’s favorite toy car instead.

Here’s a pic of the car (you can really see I could have been a professional photographer if I had wanted to), and a snapshot of a circuit I found somewhere on Google.

The Photoshop routine

Right, let’s use the Quick Selection tool to select our motorized subject. Let’s leave the shadow out of our selection, as we will add the shadow ourselves. Copy and Paste the selection on the circuit and use Command+T (CTRL + T for windows users) to resize the car. Give it some realistic size and position on the road and validate your reshaping task.

If you have followed my previous tutorial (Create realistic shadows in Photoshop), then you wont have any issue following the next few steps, as we are going to give our very own Herbie a shadow. Paste once again our car onto a new layer, and give it a flat-looking and realistic position, as shown below.

Send the shadow layer to the back, by re-ordering the layers.

Use the Image/Adjustments menu to change the Hue / Saturation settings to bring the lightness to a minimum.

Give the layer some blurry effect, using Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur and a radius of around 5 pixels.

I want the viewer to concentrate on the car; therefore the size of this picture is way too big for my liking. This is when I selected only a part of it and cropped it a more appropriate shape.

Ok, now we have a good view of our car, nicely predominant on the tarmac. Let’s add some effects to it.

Create a new layer and merge whatever is visible onto it. So you can work from one flat image (and have the source available in case).

Use the Filter/Artistic/Poster edges followed by a (Filer/Artistic) Cutout effect to give your artwork a more cartoon-ish aspect.

Some Lens Flare addition will give the impression of reflecting asphalt with a ray of light coming from the back. Not too much brightness here, as we don’t want the car to be drown in the light.

Ok let’s use the Quick Selection tool to select the wheels of the car and use Filter/Stylize/Wind to give your vehicle some speed. Don’t go mad on the wind force as it won’t have the adequate effect. Wind from the right is what I selected here.

Create a new layer, and once again copy all the visible layers onto it. Use once again the Quick selection tool to select your car and shadow and use the clear key.

This will allow you to apply one last effect on the whole top layer without interfering with your main object.

Command + D to unselect your slected area, and (top layer still selected here), use the Filter/Brush Strokes/ Ink Outlines to finish off your work. This will give the background some more cartoon-ish effect, and also will place a nice outline on your lens flare lighting effect.

The Final Result

As a shady character myself, I could not find any better starting point than bringing up the subject of shadows, which is in fact, believe it or not (sad… I know), one of my Photoshop favourites when it comes down to adding a bit of style to a picture or hand-made drawing.

There must be a thousand ways to add shadows to objects or people on Photoshop, but as you may have guessed we are only going to take a look at my way of doing it.

As a young and naïve Photoshop user, I have started adding shadows the easy way, using the range of functions available by default in Photoshop.

But I quickly got bored with those. For a start, they don’t let you control much of the shadow aspect. They give the object or person you are attempting to style a glowing shadow effect, and they don’t look any close to what you had in mind. Instead I prefer going old school way… i.e. manually.

Ok let’s get started with this. I was going to pick a complicated subject, with a lot of background, colour, and details, but I eventually settled for this simple pic, as the simplicity and bare background should ease my demonstration and your subsequent understanding.

We are starting here with one single layer in Photoshop with Tintin and Snowy (Milou for the French speakers out there) on it.

Shape the shadow

Select the Quick Selection tool as shown below, and drag it over our two characters to select any are non-blank area. This done, use the Command +C / Command +V shortcuts (for Mac users) or alternatively CTRL+C / CTRL + V (for Windows users) to duplicate this non-blank content on a second layer.

The new layer selected, use Command +T (CTRL +T) to modify the shape.

Pick a spot for your future shadow. Obviously, if there were any other shadows on the picture being worked on, you would have to work a similar shadow angle to be consistent with the rest of the content. Drag the dots to your preferred shadow location. Keep the Command key (or CTRL key) pressed down while you move the dots around and give your copied Tintin and Snowy the correct angle/shape/aspect. Make sure to have both contents connected at the bottom to make your shadow the most realistic one.

Once this is done, accept the transformation by clicking the check box below.

Colour and effects

Ok, now our shadow has been shaped and placed, we need to give it the correct colour and effect.
Go to Image, then Adjustments, and choose the Hue/Saturation feature.
Bring the Lightness to a minimum to give the shadow a dark colour.

Then select Filter, Blur and click on Gaussian Blur.
Select a radius for your Gaussian blur effect. Every picture or subject being different, I rarely give the same radius. It’s more a question of felling there, but usually this radius oscillates between 5 and 10 pixels.

Finally, bring the opacity of the layer with the shadow to around 60% as shown below. There again, it’s a question of feeling and aspect.

Send the shadow to the back

If I had started my work with a white background and two layers with only the characters on both of them, this final step would be straightforward, as it would only take a layer re-ordering to send the shadow to the back (i.e. behind the characters).

I decided not to go that way to make it a tad more complex, so that you people can use this technique in pictures more elaborate with more than a uniform background.

So all we have to do here is get rid of the parts of the shadow which overlap the legs of our two subjects.
Quick and dirty technique would be to select the bottom layer, use the Quick selection tool to select both tintin and snowy, and once this done, click on the layer with the shadow and press on the delete key. This would definitely work, but unless you enlarge your picture and work in a detailed manner over your characters, the edges would never look right, making your shadow an approximate one.

If you have time like I do, then better go this way.
Add a layer mask on the shadow layer, and use the eraser to take away all over-lapping shadowy parts.

With time and precision, you will get neat edges and you will be able to reverse this action by inverting the default background/foreground colors (when black and white are selected) and un-deleting some areas of your mask.

Et voila! Hope you all enjoyed this post on shadow. Fell free to walk in mine (shadow) and adapt my technique to your needs and tastes.

The Final Result