Digital Candy

By Melissa Evans

5) Painting Depth and Highlights
Create a new layer(Photoshop Create New Layer).

Right-click on this new layer in your layers palette and select Layer Properties. Rename this layer “highlights” and click OK.

Your Layers Palette should now look like the image shown below.

Change the foreground colour to white.

Select your Paint Brush Tool (Photoshop Brush Tool) from your tool box. Use the Hard Round 19 pixel brush.

Paint some rough highlight regions on to your canvas. You can see on the image below that I created 4 highlight marks.

Next blur your highlights.
Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur…
Move the slider to something similar to mine (shown below) and click OK.

Your digital candy art should look something like the image below.

Now we are going to place a slight ident in the center of our candy.

Create another new layer(Photoshop Create New Layer). Rename the layer “indent”. Your layer palette should now look like the one shown below.

Change the foreground colour to black.
With your Paint Brush Tool paint a small black dot in the center of your candy. See image below.

Now apply a slight Gaussian Blur of around 7 pixels.
Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur…

Finally lower the opacity of the “indent” layer to around 40%. See image below.

6) The Final Swirls

What you want to achieve is an extreme center swirl. As shown below.

Click on your candy layer, “Layer 1”, to make it active. We want to apply the twirl effect to this layer.
We are going to use Twirl again.

Get your Elliptical Marquee Tool.
Holding down shift and click drag to form a small circle selection in the centre. As shown below

Filter >> Distort >> Twirl

Finally Save your new digital art.

I hope you found this Photoshop tutorial helpful.
Feel free to contact me via my contact page if you have any questions.