Hey you guys it’s Gerry here for Iceberg Creativity, coming at you with the brand new Pixelmator tutorial. And today I’m going to show you how to make this nice red orb within Pixelmator.

Now as I do remind that the end of this tutorial it is not the exact way to do it and it’s not the best method. It is just the basic method. What I’m doing is I’m showing you how to get started with this. It’s up to you guys to experiment and build upon this to make something even better.

So are you ready? Let’s get started. Begin by opening up Pixelmator if you have and then create a new document. I’m going to be using the sizes of 800 for the width and 600 for the height. I’m doing this because it’s a fairer size to work with, and it will your gem or shiny bow, whatever you like to call it a big enough size that you can use it later for maybe a wall paper or web element.

Next, we need to set up our layers, so by default you only have one. Rename it to just background, and if you label whatever you want or you can make it transparent either way is fun. Then create a new layer and rename this for whatever you want because we’re making a basic shape I’m just going to call it shape. Now the fun really begins. We’re going to start to draw our shapes, so just like the ecliptic mark key tool by hitting Y on your keyboard or selecting in tools palette and then draw a shape. Whole shaped to do so, so you get a nice even look and then just drag. You’ll see your selection appear on the screen, and if it appears you cause the edges. You can always continue to whole shape and then add and hold the space bar to move the selection around. I’m going to center mine just a little bit and perfect.

Now I’m going to fill this with the gradient, so make sure your mark key selection is still here and adjust the gradient tool over the top in the tool palette and choose the red radial gradient. It’s the third gradient in the default gradient palette that comes in Pixelmator. Click and hold in the center and then click the shift key on your keyboard and drag out until you get something you like of course, you don’t need to use red but red is the color I’m going to choose for this tutorial. Then hit M on your keyboard, and select the way from the mark key selection and you’ll see you have your nice red orb shape ready to go.

Now of course we’re not finish not by fact, so we’re going to need to create a new for our shine, so just go to your palette and create a new layer and call it well shine because it’s our shine layer. Now we’re going to make another ecliptic mark key selection, but this time it doesn’t need to be perfectly even, so hit Y on your keyboard or select in the tools palette and then drag a selection near the top of this sphere. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, but has to be more egg shaped then spherical. Once again, if you want to move it to a better position hold the space bar as well and you can move the selection around. So this works well right about here and then let my selection go, and we’re going to hit G on my keyboard to bring up my gradient tool.

Now by default, Pixelmator does not have a fade to transfer gradient, so we need the grade one, but don’t worry it’s not too difficult, so go over to your first gradient that you see or the second one whatever one you prefer, this is just a standard linear gradient and double click. I’m going t o double click the default purple one, and I’m going to modify some of the setting in here.

Firstly I’m going to click the bottom one. You will see that there’s a little box highlight blue to let you know that area is selected, and I’m going to change the color to just pure white. Next I’m going to select the next tool and instead of modifying their color I’m going to modify their opacity. And then I will drag it down to zero. And I’m going to be doing the same for the next one as well. This will give us a white two fade gradient. And then just click okay, and then drag it from the bottom to the top holding shift and then you will see a nice shine appear on your orb see?

Now we’re going to add the final bit of detail for our little orb here, so start up by creating a new layer and rename it to whatever you want. I’m going to call this second shine, and since I want it below my first one. I’m going to drag it below it, but make sure it still above this here next we need to make a final selection for our shine, so to save a bit of time we’re going to command click the thumb nail for shape in the layers box so when I use palette whatever you like to call it and look at the selection around it. We need to make this smaller to do this go to edit and then chose refine selection. This is quite a nifty little tool within Pixelmator, and I suggest you make friends with this because as with many things I do in my tutorials, we’ll be touching back with this tool a lot. So I want it to make it a bit smaller but not too small. So I’m going to bring it down to a happy medium which is about 35 to 50%. I’m just going to use 35 it’s probably the best one to choose, and I will hit OK.

Now we can see that we had this selection shrunk on orb shape or whatever you like to call it hit G on your keyboard to bring up your gradient, and drag from the bottom holding shift or rather from the top to the bottom. And you get this nice shine hit M on your keyboard and then select the way to get rid of this selection. And now you can choose to fix the opacity if you wish or change the blending mood maybe to soft light or you can choose to put it to color although that might not be the best option. You can choose multiply, or you can leave it alone and just bring the opacity down. I like to bring it down once again to about 35 to 50% is the best option or rather it’s the best effect. And that’s really all there is to it guys.

Once again as I said in the beginning of the tutorial this is not to show you how to make an exact glowing orb or shiny orb with Pixelmator. It’s to show the basic steps on how one could achieve it. It’s just to show you how to get started. It’s up to you guys to experiment and build on this and make something even better than what I made. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learn some things, and stay tune because there’s plenty more of bright tutorials coming. I’m finishing off one now that shows you how to add fog or smoke to a nice lake steep.

Anyway guys thanks for watching and keep checking for more OS tips, tutorials and maybe a few reviews in the coming weeks. Talk to you all later guys.