basket tutorial

Why, you may ask, would you want to know how to draw a basket for your doll? To which I reply, why wouldn't you? Baskets are inherently cool, and also make great accessories for any doll, whether she's sewing, gathering flowers, going shopping, or just carrying a basket around.

Most baskets are some shade of brown. Here are two palettes you could use, or you can go find your own colors, either way.

1. If your graphics program supports layers, create a new one for your basket. This way it will be easier to start over if you screw up.

2. Draw the outline of your basket in a dark shade. Don't worry about the handle for now, we'll get to that later. For now, you just want the basic shape. Draw some lines "striping" the outline at more or less even intervals.

I find that the easiest way to make this look right is to draw the left-hand half of each line, then copy it and flip it sideways to make the right-hand half. This way you get a nice symmetrical shape.

3. Now you have a shape divided into sections. Choose a medium brown, and start filling in the sections with a one-pixel stripe, like so:

4. In the next section, do the same thing, but stagger the stripes -- that is, draw a stripe under each blank space, and leave the space under each stripe blank, like this:

5. Continue this way until the whole basket is filled in with stripes. Then go back and with a slightly darker shade fill in the empty stripes.

Now that you've nearly gone blind, I should note that you can do steps 3 and 4 simply by making a new image 2 or 4 pixels square, striping that, and using it to flood fill the sections of your basket. But where's the fun in that? :) (Besides, you'll probably still have to fill in the corners by hand.)

6. Select the Retouch tool. Set it to "Darken RGB", and adjust the settings to something like this:

7. Carefully go over the dark outlines of your basket, darkening them and about one pixel on each side of them.

(A good way to control the Retouch tool is to hold down the shift key and click along the line that you are retouching, at short intervals. While the shift key is held down, the tool you are using will follow a straight line between one click and the next. When using the Retouch tool, the effect is much more even than it is if you try to do it freehand.)

8. Change the setting on the Retouch tool to "Lighten RGB", and the brush size to 1. (You may also need to adjust the opacity.) Carefully lighten the center of each section.

9. At this point, you have a nice, realistic-looking basket:

Now, you could draw your flowers or knitting or what-have-you in the basket and set it down by your doll's feet. If, on the other hand, you want her to be carrying it by a handle, keep reading.

10. Select your dark brown color again, and draw your basket handle. It should be at least a couple of pixels thick.

11. Select the Retouch tool again. Set it to "Darken RGB" and change the brush size to 2. Darken sections of the handle, spacing the dark spots as evenly as you can. It's getting a little hard to see the changes in shade in my examples, so I've circled a few of the darkened places in red.

12. Change the retouch mode to "Lighten RGB" and do the same thing, overlapping the darkened bands a little, so that the handle looks fairly smoothly shaded.

13. The moment of truth! Position the basket over your doll so that the handle is in her hand...

...and erase the section of the handle that would be hidden by her hand. This may take a couple of tries, while you figure out which portion of her hand is outermost.

14. Congratulations! You now have a basket-carrying doll. All that's left to do is draw in the contents of the basket (assuming there are any).

You're done! Yay!

(Base credit: Josie's Dollz.)

Experiment with basket shape to get the look you want. Here are a few examples: feel free to use them on your dolls.