Welcome to vectorportraits.com.This site will teach you how to make your own vector portraits. Every artist has their own style of creating vector portraits, ranging from ultra-realistic to very cartoony. What you’ll learn on this website is my style of making one and hopefully you can come up with your own style after learning the basics of vector art. Let’s begin.
What you need to get started:
- Basic Photoshop
7 skills (or later) - A steady hand
- An eye for details
- Some time and patience
Reference Photo:
This photo is what we’re going to work on for this tutorial.
And this is what we will end up with:
Photoshop Basics:
For this tutorial, we will use Photoshopto create our vector portraits. Most artist prefer Illustrator for vector graphics but for this tutorial Photoshop will do. We will use the Pen Tool (PS Shortcut: P) primarily in creating the vector portrait. This tool is used to produce vector shapes and the vector shapes that you will create will ultimately form the portrait that you are working on. If you haven’t used the pen tool before here’s a primer:
To create a basic vector shape, just click wherever you want to start on the canvass and continue clicking to create a square shape. Click again where your shape started to close the shape. A new shape layer will appear in your layer pallette.
There are two ways to deal with curved shapes using the pen tool. The first one is to use a curve node which creates a smoother curve and the other is to use lots of nodes to trace the curve.
Method 1:
After finishing the curve, you can still edit the curve by holding the CTRL key while still using the pen tool. Your cursor will change to a plain white arrow to edit any node on your current curve. Just click on any node and drag it to edit the curve.
Method 2:
This is easier than the first method but may result to not as smooth as the curve from the first method. All you do is zoom into the curve that you wanted to trace then click along the curve to create a lot of nodes which when zoomed out looks like a smooth curve.
Before we start:
We need to set the pen tool options and shape options
