Metal Armor Photoshop Tutorial

Flash Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorials

Flash Games

Flash Game Design

Step 24.

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This is part 3 of the Metal Armor Photoshop Tutorial. Now we move onto the middle section of the metal, following similar guidelines to the first section of metal. I begin by adding rough shadows to the edges and bottom of the conductor plate using the burn tool.

Step 25.

Using the previously explained hard round brush with size and opacity set to pen pressure, I roughly paint in the basic light and shadows to the metal attachment.

Step 26.

Using the smudge tool, I blend all the colours together, nothing needs to be too neat as it will be covered by a texture later. It also adds realism to the supposedly "used and worn" metal.

Step 27.

Now I will add a few details that can be used below the textured overlay, bearing in mind the contour of the metal. In black I have painted the holes drilled in for the screws, lifting the edges to fit the shape of the metal.

Step 28.

Now we can add the texture to the metal. Using your metal texture, place it into your desired location above the metal layer.

Step 29.

Making it easier for myself I have cropped the image down, leaving a margin of texture around the main stroke drawn earlier on.

Step 30.

Like we did using our previous textures, I reduce the opacity of my layer and warp the texture to fit the contour of our metal.

Step 31.

I then repeated the process of selecting the layer using the "vector mask thumbnail", inverting the selection and erasing any unwanted texture. I then returned my layer back to 100% opacity.

Step 32.

Like we did before, we set the layer to overlay.

Step 33.

We now need to create a new layer above our texture, this will be our detail layer. Repeating our previous steps of detail, I have added scratches, dents and scuffs to our metal, including small areas of lighting and shines and finally painting in some screws.

Step 34.

And finally, our last piece of detail for our conductor plate... the warning pattern. Same process as before... I place my pattern into its designated area and erased any unwanted areas. I then set the layer to overlay and reduced its opacity. And lastly, using the eraser... its brush settings set exactly the same as our painting brush, I begin to erase scratches into the pattern. It is the same process as our details, only this time we are removing areas as opposed to adding them.

Step 35.

We are now on the last section of our metal... the knuckle dusters. We again repeat the same steps... I begin by roughly adding shadows and highlights using the burn tool.

Step 36.

As before, we place our metal texture into the desired location.

Step 37.

We then select our knuckle dusters using the same process by command clicking on each of the knuckle dusters "vector mask thumbnails".

Step 38.

We again need to invert our selected areas by pressing command/shift/I and with our texture layer selected, we erase all the unnecessary areas.

Step 39.

Once we have removed the unwanted texture and our selection deselected, we set our layer to overlay.

Step 40.

And to complete our metal, after creating a new layer above our texture, we add our final details such as scratches, dents, scuffs and lighting. These will need to be painted more prominently in specific areas to give the illusion of edges, again using the hard round brush... settings set to pen pressure as before.

And there you have a 40 step tutorial for creating metal. The key shortcuts demonstrated in this tutorial were for Mac... but these are relatively the same on PC... instead of using the command key, you will instead need to use Ctrl. That is pretty much it... the best of luck to those of you who give it a shot, I hope it will be helpful!

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