Creating Simple Vector Portraits on Photoshop

As the trend of personalized drawn portraits increases, many have turned to different drawing apps and softwares to create their own innovative vector portraits.

These portraits mainly have the mainframes of the facial and surrounding features drawn such as the hair, eyebrows and clothing.

Surprisingly without your face drawn apart from your eyebrows, we are still able to tell who the portrait is about in one glance. However this creative portrait generated by an app but by adding different layers of pen outline over the image to create a simple layered photo.

The software I used was Adobe Photoshop which cost approximately $239 SGD/year.

Here's how I went about doing it:

1. Importing your base photo

Your base layer of this portrait will be the actual photo. When you create each layer of colour filling, a new layer will need to be added.

2. Adding a layer for each element

To add a layer, click on the second icon from the most bottom right of the screen.

3. Tracing and filling colours

Using the Pen tool on the left toolbar, trace out the features that you wish to fill in with the colour and right click to fill path. Go ahead and use the paintbrush or eraser to clean up sharp edges or small mistakes along the way!

Here's a simple tutorial video for Beginners like me by Nadz:

https://youtu.be/SCFANzKXdRY

Tip: With subjects that wear accessories such as necklaces and spectacles, you will need to be more detailed in zooming in to ensure that the shapes of the items are identical to the actual picture to make it as realistic as possible.

For those who you do not have Adobe Photoshop at home, fret not! There are other Free apps out in the app store for use as well on laptop, Iphone and Androids such as Procreate and MediBang that can be easily downloaded.

Tip: It would help the accuracy a lot more if you trace the subjects on your phone or an iPad instead using a stylus for better control.

If you are a fellow photoshop newbie trying this too, do let me know how you are doing and feel free to let me know if there are tips you would recommend your follow newbie here as well!

Till next time,

Graceywracey