Design a Bloody Knife in Photoshop CC

Key Takeaways

hello gary simon here of designcourse.com today is february 2nd with our 32nd or 33rd i don't even know anymore video of the year and we are just going to design a knife i don't know why actually i do know why i had a hard time coming up with an idea of what we were going to do today because i mean doing a video every day of the year is kind of difficult so i came up with this idea just for some practice with the pen tool and adobe photoshop cc and also working with just some shading and playing around with layer styles so this would be a good tutorial if you're looking to do something that maybe might look a little bit photorealistic in photoshop so we're going to design a knife with some blood on it so of course as always check out designcourse.com and if you haven't yet go ahead and subscribe here on youtube all right uh the project files of course they're available for free in the description below this video in youtube all right let's get started all right so to get started we're going to go ahead to go to file new and we'll just call this knife and the width i'm going to use 860 by 600 fits well for my resolution at 100 uh background contents i i always leave it at transparent and i'm going to take the paint bucket tool hit control 1 to get to 100 and for our layer 1 which will be our background let's go ahead and i'm going to choose like a color right around i don't know right around here d6 d66 hit okay and fill that in all right so for our uh knife we're going to design you know basically like a kitchen knife not one of those insane military ones that are like real complex um so i'm gonna get started here with the pen tool make sure shape is specified not path over here and the fill we'll just make it something a little bit darker and we'll start off over here with the handle the end of the handle and work our way through so i'm just going to click once and i'm going to hold shift all the way to around here and left click and drag click out or hold out and then over here slightly down just click once so usually the top of a knife it will kind of taper off at the end um let me go back just a little bit further right around there okay and then we want to come down like right around here so to do that we will left click and drag hold shift so it's i basically completely horizontal and then hold the alt key and only drag that in or out just a tad bit so we want like a rounded edge and then we'll come over here click once hold shift and drag up just a little bit and then come down here and we're going to end it a little bit further and hit alt and left click and kind of round that all right so if yours doesn't look like this that's fine i'm actually going to make some adjustments to the to the point so i for example i want to move this point hold shift left click hold shift make sure you select those three you may not need to do this i kind of want this to be down just a tad bit further and then also i want this to be just a little bit thicker so i'm going to take all these points by holding shift kind of just drag them down a little bit maybe take this one pull it out and let's kind of look at the proportions here in terms of if you hit control h you can get rid of those views just so you can see a little bit better and i may just extend everything out a tad bit making this wider so hit ctrl h again take the direct selection tool over here and take all these actually let me just take those two up the top that way extend it out a little bit further all right i guess right around there is good all right so now what i want to do i let's change this base color to right around there which is b8b8b8 hit okay now we're going to hit ctrl shift n and we're going to create a clipping mask to make sure that's selected hit ok and then we're going to take a the rectangle tool and we're going to drag out right around here you can hold alt and hit ctrl h and that's going to be the start of the actual handle it just kind of comes in slightly right here and we want to make that a little bit darker let's say around 2c 2c2c all right so now we have the basic the two basic parts of the knife done which is the handle of course and then the actual blade so now we want to do uh what we want to do is to kind of get some shading going on here um so just initially and i i viewed this kind of through a reference image i was doing a search on google images and it seems like you know a lot of kitchen knives still have this portion right here that kind of is like an indentation so i'm going to start with that first so basically starting right around here we'll click and you want to go just above maybe like a pixel um above this uh the bottom of the blade click once there we'll hold shift maybe go like right here around there and just slightly drag it up and then we will connect it back right there alright so now what i want to do is go ahead and rasterize that take the blur tool and or not the blur so the eraser tool rather and just slightly bring that into like a fade then what i want to do is take the blur tool right here and the strength is set at 100 and i have a size 64. so we'll see what that does if we just slightly bring that in a little bit okay now we may want to take the opacity down just a little bit so far it doesn't look good but that's expected all right so i let's create another layer we'll come up here and kind of come down like right here and then follow it through to this side and then come up to the middle all right something like that then i want to go ahead and take i will go ahead to we'll rasterize that as well with the blur tool take the blur tool rather make maybe adjust the opacity a little bit maybe move it in just a little bit all right that's good for now i think and we'll take another layer with the pen tool kind of come up right around there and we will rasterize that and blur it out just a little bit maybe drop the opacity down all right then we're going to work on this portion uh these all if you take them all holding shift create clipping mask that way you make sure it stays inside the actual blade let's create a new layer clipping mask i'm going to take the brush tool something around the size of 146 and just start out over here and hold shift and just drag out and then you could take this of course the uh square the rectangle marquee tool and just delete that portion and we can go ahead and take the experiment with the blend mode a little bit maybe something to around there that's fine for now and now what i want to do is linked in the project file or the description of this video on youtube uh there's a link to a deviantart uh resource images actually is that deviantart or not no one second i gotta find that actually no that was from flickr uh it's linked here in the description and youtube and just uh the video and this is the image we want so um let me see here if we click on download all sizes and just take this one that's large 1024. i'm going to copy that or you can save it and then open it up and copy it but now it's in my clipboard and so now what i want to do is go ahead and take i think i'm going to put it just above here so if i hit ctrl shift n hit ok or enter and paste that in hit ctrl t scale this down just so that we see everything hit apply and i play with the blend mode so if we use our arrow key and come down we can kind of just experiment and try to find something that makes it look pretty realistic so if i go back up to the top i think what one thing i want to do is take the color of the knife and make it a little bit lighter so around e5 e5 e5 and we can just barely see it behind on normal or on overlay rather so i'm going to go back up and go through these with the down arrow key until i find something that i think works well and if i don't think something works well we'll just move it to the top and see how this begins to affect it if we play around with the uh the black layer blend modes also it seems like there's a blue hint to it or higher hue so if i go image adjustments desaturate we can get rid of that and also we see this overlapping so we want to delete that hard light might actually work so let's go through one more time actually i think soft lights better we don't want it to stand out too much all right so then what i want to do is keep on working on the actual the shading and such over here so let me take uh the move tool auto select layer checked on oh it's obviously going to choose that one so never mind that we just need to find yeah right there i'm going to take the eraser and kind of taper off this portion all right and then what i want to do is we'll come we'll take the uh the pen tool and just go underneath that texture layer create a new layer ctrl shift n and we will take the pen tool and we'll come let's see start out here just before it starts the blade and slightly just click and drag and will come just to the top of this thing all right let facebook open what am i doing and then we'll i rasterize that take the blur tool and take this down a notch and i'm going to do basically the same thing one more time except with a a brush so let's go ahead i'd say around 73 will work and that needs to come down quite a bit all right and then what we're going to do is take the move tool take our bottom shape layer you i hold the ctrl key and then left click and that gives us a selection of the path itself and then what we want to do is go to select modify contract by one pixel hit okay select inverse and we'll come up here to this layer we created and hit the delete key hit ctrl d to deselect and you'll see it created kind of a basically a one pixel white edge so let's take the eraser tool i don't want it to be right there on that portion all right and let's see here maybe bring that down a little bit more all right so far not too bad i trying to think if there's anything else i want to do i may take a a new layer above our texture uh right click make sure it's a clipping mask and take the white for the foreground and just kind of go across holding shift and let me experiment with the layer blend mode yeah it's actually not going to work the way i want it to so i'm going to take the eraser tool just kind of get rid of that that middle portion i think that's well what the hell happened that didn't look right all right that's well all right i think that's fine all right i and you could take down the opacity a little bit i think i like it kind of up there real white all right and we're almost done with this part come back down here maybe a larger brush even though i've done this a lot of this is just about experimenting trying to create a realistic shadows and and highlights all right so i'd say that looks pretty good here i now let's go ahead and focus on the handle the handle isn't going to have like any type of uh gradients or anything we're just going to use the pen tool so we can start you know just here at the bottom you can click here and then we'll just start right around outside of it and when it comes to handles they're usually you know kind of obviously three dimensional all right so and come above that layer right there change the color to be like a highlight barely noticeable we'll create another one oops maybe right on the edge maybe make this one black and then do one more right click oh no we have to do that what am i doing all right and maybe just change this to slightly darker and that's like pitch black i don't like that so let's take the select well no it's right there right around there like 29 and then they usually have these three circular we'll take the sphere tool or ellipse tool metal things that hold it together and what we'll do here is double click on that to bring up layer styles we'll take gradient overlay we'll change the style to angle we'll take the gradient editor and let's create several of these things i'll call them and we'll go back and forth between that color and white color pickers let's see here and then end it right there on there we'll hit okay so now it kind of creates a little metallic type of effect will duplicate this now when you duplicate that and you have think uh layers above that's what happens that kind of just no big deal we'll uh fix that afterwards right there and then duplicate it again or you can just right click go to duplicate layer it's kind of off the screen or set up a hotkey i use ctrl shift d to uh duplicate and then take all those again right click and create clipping mask all right all right so i that is pretty much almost it let's create uh a couple of other things here let's take the actual shape layer for the knife and let's put in drop shadow and it's kind of hard because i don't have a lot of screen to work with take the opacity down maybe just to around there like nine percent hit okay and now let's go ahead and just for the fun of it go ahead create a new layer at the top make it a clipping mask hit okay and i'll link the blood spatter brushes in the description those are just they're really easy install you just double click i'm gonna load in or you click over here and just go to load brushes once you download them and let's just experiment with some these are real bigs by the way so let's take a darker red color obviously you only want it to be on the actual handle or not handle but the blade and i'm just going to experiment with a couple of different ones here just to get an idea of what i might want to use well i'm not bringing on that maybe just something subtle like that and then come down here beneath layer one or on top of layer one or background layer and let's get another one let me right there come back up here let's change the blend mode so it appears maybe a little bit darker yeah i think we had one up there that would work well uh linear burn seems to work well and then down here we can put an adjustment layer on it let's go to window adjustments find it here uh maybe just a hue is all we need but we'll see here click on this so that only affects that take the heat the saturation down a little bit otherwise too bright it doesn't really look right blood will naturally stain a little bit darker as it or at least i think it does all right okay so that is it so you can as you can see you can kind of quickly it's only been about 20 minutes create something that looks you know semi-realistic uh if you ever need to create um any type of blood you know we have a lot of there's a lot of great brushes out there for that sort of thing all right and that is it so i of course always check out designcourse.com and if you haven't yet subscribe here on youtube uh and check out the different social networks we're on facebook twitter google plus etc alright so i will see you guys tomorrow you