With baseball season upon us I thought we needed a little baseball doll. It is a unisex doll..could be a boy or a girl :) First and most important let me remind you to SAVE OFTEN!! I had started out this tutorial and forgot to save and lost it all and had to start over again..I even lost this outline in WordPad and had to start this over also..will I never learn? :) So let's get started I made this using vectors but thought I would save you the time and trouble by saving selections after I converted to raster and then zipped up the selections. I have also included in this zip some added extras in psp form...i.e. the eyes, nose, mouth etc. You can use the selections and images I supplied or you can ad lib and make your own..either way is fine with me. Baseball Tute Selections and extras Open up a new image size 500x500 with a tranparent background. You can resize once it is finished but it makes it easier to work with a bigger image. Go to layer palette and choose new layer calling it HEAD. Make your foreground color Null and set background color at #E3C2AE, or any flesh color of your choosing. Use the head selection or draw out an oval using your preset shapes tool, and flood fill with flesh color. Now we are going to apply a cutout. Go to selections and make sure that float is selected then go to Effects/3Deffects/Cutout and apply the following settings. The shadow color I used was #D1A883. I used these same cutout settings for most all of the cutout sections of this tutorial with little or no changes except in shadow coloring. I then applied Noise/3%/Uniform to blend the colors together. Now deselect. New Layer named EYES. You can choose to use the psp eyes I have included with the zip file or make them yourself. Background color set to #FFF4E3 using airbrush tool with settings of. Spray on oval for eye then make your airbrush smaller and change color to blue, or green or brown, whatever you choose...I chose Blue. Make airbrush even smaller still and change color to black and spray into the blue. Now you can copy and paste a new selection and line up next to other eye. New layer for nose. Background null and foreground set at #D1A883 and choose preset shapes tool and set at ellipse. Draw a small oval for the nose. I then clicked on the eraser tool and erased the top part leaving only bottom. Now wasn't that easy? :) New Layer named mouth1 it will take 3 layers to make the mouth but we will merge it when it is finished. Set foreground color to black and background null. Same settings for the preset shapes tool. Draw a small oval. Use eraser tool and erase parts of the oval until you achieve a partial oval for side of mouth. Then copy and paste as a new selection and go to Image/Mirror and line it up across from first oval. New Layer call it mouth2 and do the oval shape again for the middle part of the mouth. Draw out to your liking and then use eraser tool to erase part of mouth that expands past the sides of the mouth. Here is what we have so far. New layer for bottom part of the mouth. Move your black color to the background position and use right click on mouse and draw out an oval for the bottom part of the mouth.
Using eraser tool set to round. Erase the part of the oval that goes past the top of the middle part of mouth.
Once you have done that use Magic Wand and select the oval for bottom of mouth. Set color to a red and go to airbrush tool. Round size 16 and spray into mouth for the tongue. Then use retouch tool set to push and drag some of the black down into the middle of the tongue. This is what you should have now.. Now put an X on the glasses on layer 1 to hide it and merge visable the face layers and rename it HEAD. Next we will add some hair to the head. I have included the hair tube that I used, in the selections file, or you can use the image I included in psp form of the hair as I have it. You can use colorize to change color of hair. Choose a new layer and name it hair and set your tube settings at...size 30 step 8. and spray on some hair. New Layer named CAP. Choose a color to your liking. I chose Red #FF0000, load the bbcap.sel and flood fill with red. Go to selections and chose float then go to cutout. These are the settings. Then change the settings to -2 for the vertical and horizontal. I then applied noise of 3% again. then deselect. I added a new layer and added some lines to the cap and a little black button for the top of the cap. Use your own creativity here. Merge the cap layers. We are now done with the head and cap. We will move on to the neck now. Click on the 1st layer and choose new layer and name it NECK. Set your background color to the flesh color again (#E3C2AE). Go to selections and load from disk the neck.sel and flood fill with your flesh color and do a cut out on it same as your other settings on cutout, but change the shadow color back to #D1A883, and apply the noise of 3% again. At this point I again loaded the head selection and gave it a drop shadow of med gray (#808080) settings of V & H=1 Opacity of 53 and Blur of 5.3. Add New Layer and call it Shirt. Load Shirt selection and fill with your choice of color. I have included my pattern fill in case you want to use it or you can make your own. I then applied the cutout, same settings..shadow black. Make a new layer to add designs to your shirt. I drew a single red line with a width of 3 down the center of the shirt and lowered the opacity of the layer to about 40%. New layer airbrush color black, round, size 7, settings and sprayed on some buttons for the shirt. I also added a team name and number on the shirt. I then merged these two layers. I added a new layer and used the line tool set to bezier curve and the foreground color set to black. I drew a line and curved it to put where the sleeves start. This is what I have so far... Don't worry if your bezier curve lines go outside of the shirt area. All you have to do is load the shirt selection and invert it and hit delete button to get rid of any lines outside of the shirt. Now we will move on to the pants. Create a new layer and name it pants. Load bbpants.sel. Flood fill with your color choice. Go to selection float and apply same cutout we have been using all along but shadow set to black again. and again change settings to - (minus) 2 on the V & H. Noise 3%. New layer to add shadows to crotch area and inner leg. Merge these two layers. Ready for the legs? New Layer called legs. Load bbleg.sel. Flood fill with the flesh color. Go to selections float and then apply the cutout but only the one with the 2 and noise 3%. Copy and paste as new selection and mirror and put over on other leg. Make sure this layer is under the pants layer. Legs done..that was pretty easy huh? :) New Layer for socks. Color set to white now. What I did was use the airbrush tool set to square size 32 with opacity, density and hardness all set to 100 and step set at 25 and I went to bottom of leg and sprayed on the socks..make sure this level is on top of the legs layer. I then took eraser tool and set it same size as the airbrush was and erased some of the bottom of the sock. Gotta have room for the shoes here :) I applied cutout one time. Usual setting. New Layer called shoe. Load bbshoe.sel and flood fill with black. New Layer load bbsole.sel and flood fill with light gray. Go to paint brush round, size 2 and paint on some eyelets and shoe laces and then a bow. Merge these two layers only name shoe. Then copy and paste as a new selection and mirror it for other side. New Layer load the bbarm.sel. Flood with flesh color do the float and cutout thing again and add your noise. Copy and paste as new selection and mirror it put in place. Add new layer called Bat. Load selection named bbbat.sel and flood with a wood pattern of your choice, float and add cutout one time. Deselect. New layer load the bball.sel and fill with white and apply cutout one time after floating selection. I added 2 red oval lines and used eraser on it erasing intermittently to look like stitching on a baseball. Add new layer (last one I promise) load up the bbbelt.sel and flood with color of choice and float and do cutout then load bbbuckle.sel and fill with white then apply shiny gold in Blade Pro to it and add a slight shadow.
We are Done!! Yeahhhh. Sorry this was so long. Hope you enjoyed it. I will look forward to seeing your finished baseball player. If you find mistakes in this tutorial feel free to let me know so that I can fix them.
Here is my finished ball player.
