Translator’s words: Outline illustration is a design style with strong visual effects. It simplifies cumbersome objects to the greatest extent and uses only some of the most basic shapes to express them, but it can still convey the focus and focus of the original object. characteristic. In fact, the most important thing in creating this style of design is not Photoshop skills, but your ability to extract the most basic elements of an object. From this point of view, this kind of design is more closely related to your art foundation. Related, if you have a foundation in sketching and painting, you will be more comfortable.
Outline illustrations are increasingly popular in today’s design. This form of design extracts some of the most basic elements of an object and turns them into an artistic design. Whether it is in web pictures, FLASH movies, magazine advertisements or even TV commercials, we can see this kind of design art. Outline illustrations simplify an object but still convey its most essential characteristics. In this article, I will show you how to create this effect in Photoshop. I hope this article can inspire you.
Definition of contour effect
In fact, there are many definitions of this artistic effect. However, most of the definitions have two things in common: First, outline illustrations generally focus on the outline of the object. Second, remove the unnecessary background and leave only these most basic elements. All in all, outline drawing mainly expresses the most important visual elements such as objects (including objects, people or buildings).
Let’s get started: Here we are going to create an ad for golf sportswear. Let’s start with the photo below.
Completed effect of original image
When faced with this photo, you first need to decide which area of your design you most want to express. I personally think that for this photo, I don't need to use all the outlines of the character, because I feel that the light-facing side and shadow of his shirt can already convey a dynamic character, but I need to make some appropriate adjustments. adjustment. The main issue with outline drawing is your feel for detail. You can use various adjustment tools in Photoshop to make your designs stand out. Take this original image, reduce its number of colors, and you'll find an effect that will inspire you.
Photoshop process
Select the image in the Photoshop Layers panel, then open the list of new adjustment layer buttons under the panel and select Posterize, as shown below.
When you select this Posterization tool, you will notice that the image has changed a lot, and at the same time, a dialog box will pop up.
The Posterize command allows you to specify the number of tones (or brightness values of the tones) for each channel of the image. We set the number of dialog boxes to 3, which will reduce the number of tonal levels within the image.
After applying this command, you can see that the original image becomes an image with only a few colors. Now you can take a closer look at this image and select some elements that you think are important. You can notice that the face of the character in the picture is mostly black, and the hat is almost completely black. At the same time, there are also some particularly bright areas. We're going to paint these highlighted areas with a bright color. This way we can make the outlines of the characters in the picture distinct.
We can create illustrations through shape layers. First, we select the Pen Tool , and then select the "Shape Layers" button on the upper toolbar. And set the foreground color to white.
Now we start tracing the shiny area along the shirt to the shoulders. You don't need to paint a perfect picture. In fact, you only need to use some basic geometric shapes and then use some intuition to freely play with certain subtleties. When you're done tracing, we'll name this layer SHIRT.If the white filled area blocks the original image when you draw, you can lower the opacity of the image to 20% so that it is not blocked when you draw. Of course, it needs to be adjusted back to 100% when finished.
