Photoshop is a very powerful aid to your creativity, but only if you know the basics of interface creation. To use an analogy, its a bit like driving a car - you can be familiar with the tools at your disposal (i.e. the brake, accelerator, gear stick, etc), but unless you actually know how to use them properly, you'll be going nowhere fast. Likewise, knowing all the metal effects & shiny plastic techniques in the world won't get you very far if you miss out on the basics. In my opinion, one of the most basic skills you MUST pick up to be an effective interface designer is learning how to make complex shapes. So, without further ado, here is my tutorial on making one of the more complex shapes around - a handgun grip.
Step 1: Create a new 300px by 300px document with a white background. Create a new transparent layer on top and call it shape. Using the Rectangular Marquee Tool, draw a rectangle and use the Edit > Fill command from the menu to create a black rectangle in the shape layer.
Step 2: Now go back into the menu and choose Edit > Transform > Distort. Click and drag the corner points around until you end up with a shape similar to the one on the left. Click outside the selection to render the effect permanent.
Step 3: Ok, now we can work on the finger grooves. Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and draw a little oval shape. Move it into an appropriate position and press the BACKSPACE key on your keyboard to remove an oval-shaped chunk from your distorted rectangle.
Step 4: Without losing your oval selection, move it along to create the other two grooves. Remember that holding down the SHIFT key whilst using the cursor keys will move your selection about a little faster and at regular intervals. This can be very useful if you want to maintain a sense of symmetry in your shapes.
Step 5: Well, its not bad, but its not very ergonomic either, is it? Rectify this by creating a new transparent layer on top of all the others called shape2 and select it. Now draw a long rectangular selection using the Elliptical Marquee Tool, and Edit > Fill it with a non-black colour. In this case I used blue, but you may find 50% grey just as convenient.
Step 6: Use the eraser tool to remove all parts of the circle you don't want. Holding SHIFT on the keyboard whilst clicking on the shape or shape2 layer will load up a selection around the underlying shape and allow cleaner deletion of excess pixels (you will then only be able to erase areas within the selection). Together with Select > Inverse this is a powerful way of cleaning up your work. There's no need to be overly neat - we'll take care of excess jagged edges and corners in the next step.
Step 7: With the top layer active, select Layer > Merge Down to join the two parts of the complex shape together. Now run through my anti-aliasing tutorial with a Gaussian blur of 5 to smooth out the edges and get a result similar to that on the left.
Et voila - a nice looking gun handle shape is yours, and ready to be made into an interface using whatever plastic effects or metallic techniques you have at your disposal. Enjoy! :)
