jewelry tutorial

So you have your doll basically finished, elegant dress, classy hairstyle, and beautiful face, and now all she needs is a finishing touch.

1. Zoom in on your finished doll.

2. Create a new layer for your jewelry -- this is not necessary, but makes it a lot easier to start over if you screw up.

3. Using a fairly dark metal color, draw the outline of your necklace. Keep it fairly simple, because at this scale anything too fancy will either look strange or go completely unnoticed.

4. Zoom in a bit more so you can see exactly what you're doing. Now select the Retouch tool. Set the brush to a small size and a very low opacity, and set it to Dodge mode.

5. Go over the necklace outline carefully with the Retouch tool, lightening random pixels. For the sake of simplicity, we're imagining the light coming from the upper left, so in general, you want to make the pixels farther to the left and top lighter than the rest.

If you're using Paint or another program that doesn't have fancy options like Dodge, you can still get this effect by selecting lighter colors from the metal palette you used to draw the necklace, and coloring in random pixels.

6. Now fill in the space with your jewel color. If you're using the palettes above, you want the deepest, brightest color.

7. Depending on the size of your necklace, you can add highlights and shadows to the jewel with the other palette colors.

8. Zoom out to see how your doll looks.

If you're happy with her, you can stop right here. If, like me, you don't think the necklace shows up quite enough, go to Image > Effects > Drop Shadow and add a little shadow under it. Play with the settings until you like the way it looks.

You're done! Yay!

(Base credit: Swan Lake.)