Puddle Tutorial

We've all wanted to make that gorgeous doll next to that gorgeous puddle of water. I'm going to try to teach you an easy way to do it.

Note: This tutorial is specifically for Adobe Photoshop. I imagine you could do it in Paint Shop Pro or another fancy program, but because of the tools used, you'll need to be able to understand your program quite well. If you use Paint, sorry, I can't help you there.

Here's what we're making.

First, we need some pretty clouds. To do this, choose a forground of dark blue, a background of light blue, and go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds. You should have the above picture, or something similar to it.

Now, we want the swirly-ness of the puddle. This can be achieved with Filter -> Blur -> Radical Blur. I've shown the settings I used.

You should now have this.

Now we need the ripple effect. Go to Filters -> Distort -> Ocean Ripple.

Now to get an even wateryer appearance. Go to Filters -> Sketch -> Chrome, with these settings.

We should now have this.

Now select the circle using the circular marquee tool. It may take several tries to get a proper-sized circle.

Ctrl+Alt+I on your keyboard will invert the selection. Press delete.

And now we have a puddle of grey. If you're looking at it from directly above, it's ok, but I'll assume you don't want to do that. So deselect and make the canvas about twice as wide.

Now go to Edit -> Transform -> Skew, and make it really wide at the bottom.

That works, but let's make it look like we're on even more of an angle. Go to Edit -> Tranform -> Distort.

Now, save it as a gif. You should get this.

Because Adobe wants to be smart, it blurs the outline. Saving the picture as a gif "hardens" the outline. But now the outline is definately crappy, so open the ugly gif, and copy it into your psd document. Then fix the outline.

Now we have a pretty grey puddle. Wouldn't it look prettier in blue? To change the colour, you can overlay a layer of blue, or use the Hue/Saturation option under Image -> Adjustments, or use the Color Balance option in the same place... Basically, get it the colour you want it. (I'll assume that's blue, but I suppose you could go red for blood.)

Here's a doll I made using this technique. Notice how I blurred the bottom of the robe with the puddle? I blurred the puddle a bit in this example, but you can probably figure that out on your own. I'll explain how to do the fancy fire in another tutorial.

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