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Surf Flowers
by Matt Kloskowski
ExtremePhotoshop.com

Hi and welcome back. I am slowly starting to get back on a schedule since our newborn
arrived and I think I have a pretty good tip for you this week. I call them surf flowers.
What are they you ask? I know you've seen them all over the place. They're on Ocean
Pacific (and other surf company) t-shirts, swim shorts, and those popular Hawaiian print
shirts. Old Navy and American Eagle have them all over the place too. You know... surf
flowers. Anyway, they're a great addition to your designs and with summer here I
thought they would make for a nice tutorial. Surfs up dude - here goes!

Step 1: Create a new canvas that is 500 x 500 pixels in size. Then create a new layer
on top of the background. Now select your custom shape tool. The shape we're going to
use ships with Photoshop 7 and is part of the "Nature" shape set. So load that shape set
(Photoshops help file can assist with this if you are not familiar with how to do it) and
find this shape.

Step 2: Now that we have the correct shape selected, choose a good color for the flower
(I used R:102 G:153 B:204 for mine) and drag to create a flower.
Step 3: Next, go to the layer styles box for the flower layer and select stroke. Make the
stroke color the same as flower color and select 9 px for the size option. This is just a
quick way to round out the flower a little bit.

Step 4: Now create a new layer. Choose white as your foreground color. Make a flower
that is slightly smaller than the one that we just created in the previous steps. Apply a
stroke layer style to it once again but this time choose 5 pixels for the size. You should
have something that looks like this so far.

Step 5: OK fellow surf flower dudes, hopefully you're following along ok. Next we're
going to flatten our layer styles and make them a permanent part of the layer. This is
pretty easy if you've never done it before. Select the blue flower. Then, just right click
on the layer (or go to the layer properties for you single buttoners, a.k.a. Mac Users,
out there), and select "Create Layer". This just separates our styles out to new layers so
we can merge them. Do this for the white flower as well. Now select the new layer that
was created and hit Ctrl+E to merge it down. Do this for both blue and white flowers.
See my screen shots below for help.
Step 6: OK, now go to your layer styles again and add a dark blue stroke to each
flower. Make it 5 pixels for the blue and 2 pixels for the white flower. Your should look
like this so far.

Step 7: OK, we're just about done. Create a new layer and go to your custom shapes
once more. Select the teardrop looking shape <img src="step7_teardrop.gif">. Make
your foreground color the same blue that you used for the flower and drag out a long
thin teardrop shape. It actually won't look anything like a teardrop but that is OK.

Step 8: Now make sure your teardrop layer is active. Go to Filter->Liquify. Select a
large brush size (200 - 300) and select 15 for the brush pressure. Also make sure the
warp tool is the active one <img src="step8_warp.gif">. Now just nudge the teardrop
shape a little so its a little squiggly. Note: You could also use Filter->Distort->Shear for
this but I get more control with the liquify tool.

Step 9: Finally, I added a dark stroke to it and a gradient overlay. Then I positioned it in
the middle of the flower using the rotate tool.
Step 10: Well that's pretty much it. You could merge all of your layers use these flowers
all over the place. Here are a few examples of how I used them. Experiment and have
fun dudes.

Well that's it for this week. Hopefully you didn't mind the corny surf talk.
Also, I have finally put my gallery site back up. Feel free to visit it to find out more
about me and see some of my other work. Please use the contact page and let me know
what you think. You can reach it by clicking on the Optic Nurve link on the splash page
for www.extremephotoshop.com. Thanks again - see you next week!
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