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Vectors 101: create vector smileys in Photoshop or Illustrator

by Tom Lynch - Templates, Tutorials

Today we are presenting a tutorial on the basics of using vectors in your design. This tutorial can be followed in Photoshop or in Illustrator — the same concepts, choose the one you are comfortable with the most.

Step One: Getting started

Ok, first thing we need to do is open up Photoshop and create a new document. To start with I chose 500px x 500px, but remember, we’re creating an image here completely with vector shapes, so you can resize this as much as you like later without having to worry.

Also, for any of you who are more comfortable using Illustrator, this tutorial will work equally well for you, just instead of using the Photoshop tools I describe, use the Illustrator equivalents, just following things like colours and styles etc. I filled my document with a gradient and some noise, but that’s just my preference, you can work on a white canvas if you prefer

Step Two: The base

Grab your pen tool, make sure that the shapes option is selected and select black as your foreground colour. Now create a circular looking object that fills most of the document. The reason I say circular looking, and not circle, is because we don’t want it to be a perfect circle. With some small imperfections it looks a lot better in the end. Rename this layer ‘Base’ or something similar.

Now we have that, we want to add our main body colour to it. I’m going traditional here, and making a good old yellow smiley, so the colour I’ve used is #fff000, but feel free to change that if you wish. You could make blue, green or red smileys, pretty much anything you like, as you’ll see later. Once you’ve chosen your colour, create another shape above the Base layer, again that isn’t a perfect circle, but that leaves a nice black border running around the edge. Rename this layer to something like ‘Main Colour’.

Ok, so the base is almost done now, just one final shape and it’s complete. The last thing it needs is a small shadow layer in the bottom right (you can change the positioning of this later if you wish, once you’ve gotten the hang of the process). You need to pick a colour that is a few shades darker than your base colour, so in my case #efe100. Then, again create a new shape layer, above the Main Colour layer, and have a small arc in the bottom right section of your image, as shown below. Again, rename this layer to ‘Base Shadow’ or something similar. It doesn’t
seem all that necessary at the moment, but later when you have a lot more layers you’ll thank me for this.

Step Three: The eyes

For the eyes, you can just use a simple black oval, and they’ll look perfectly good as you’ll see in some examples later, however for this tutorial, I’m going to be making a ‘cool dude’ smiley. So I want him to have some cool black shades on. To make this, once again, reach for your pen tool and choose black as your colour. Then you’re going to want to make one half of the shades first, just the section that covers the eye.

Once you have this, you can duplicate it, flip it horizontally, and move it across to complete the shades. Then all it needs is a small bridge to connect the two. This is all pictured below, don’t forget to name your layers appropriately as you go to save confusion.

Step Four: The mouth

As before, we want to start with a black shape layer. Grab your pen tool as before, and get to work on making your mouth. It can sometimes be a good idea to do a quick doodle of what you want it to look like first so you can use that as a rough guide when you’re pen-tooling away, though if you feel comfortable with it then just go it
freestyle. I’ve gone for a cheeky kind of smile, which you’re welcome to emulate if you like, or you can of course just make your own thing.

Now we have our base mouth, we need to add some detailing. I’m going for a big grin, so I want some teeth in there. For this, grab the pen tool again and draw a white section above the black base, in much the same way you did for the base, leaving the nice black border around it.

If you like the look of that, you can skip the next couple of sections and move on to step five, but I wanted to make the teeth look more like individual teeth before I went on. All it needed, was a few thin shapes above the white shape to make the teeth individual. One line going horizontally across to seperate the upper teeth from lower, then a few more vertical lines to make individual teeth on the rows, like so:

One last thing, which came to me as a suggestion from a friend, was to add like a glint of light to the top of the mouth, to finish the cheesy look. To pull this off, just make two more shapes, this time in white, in thin diamond shapes, and rotate one to cross the other. Position that wherever you think looks best.

Step Five: Finishing touches

You’re probably thinking, it’s starting to take shape, and you’d be right. Though there are one or two things left to do. Grab your pen tool again and make a small white oval shape in the top left of your smiley. This is going to act as a sort of reflection/highlight, to give it a more realistic look. You’re aiming for something similar to the image below:

Lastly, in this instance, we have another reflective item on the smiley, it’s shades. So we need to add similar highlights for those. You can if you like, just duplicate your main highlight layer, and resize it down until it fits the shades. If you’ve added shades like me, then add a highlight in the upper left corner of both sides

And with that, your smiley is complete! If you’ve followed correctly, you should have a series of nicely labeled shape layers. If you were wondering why I said to label everything, it now means that if you were to create a new smiley, and you wanted to re-use your shades, all you need do, is look through, and duplicate your shades layers, then take them to your new smiley. You can go back and change the base colours, you can do pretty much whatever you like, just remember to always use shape layers, and then you do wonders!

If you want any more advice, or explanation regarding the tutorial, don’t hesitate to contact me via the link above, or the comments section here on TutsArena.

Download

The .PSD file is available for download below with more than one smiley design. The following designs are included in addition to the one detailed above, feel free to use them for any purpose without attribution.

Enjoy!