Produce realistic stitches in Photoshop.
Leather is an appealing texture you can enhance by adding sewing marks in Photoshop. With the Paintbrush tool, you can draw sewing marks in any color and create decorative designs. Customizing a brush tip will help you draw sewing marks in a straight line, but you will need to make them manually to create curved patterns. After drawing the basic design, you will use Photoshop filters to make the sewing marks look real. Applying the "Bevel and Emboss" filter will make the stitches appear raised, and the "Texturizer" will create the illusion of strands of thread.
Instructions
Straight Sewing Marks
1. Launch Photoshop and choose "File" and "Open," then locate your leather image and click "Open."
2. Click on the Paintbrush tool, go to the Options bar and choose a hard round brush tip from the Brush Presets panel.
3. Choose "Window" and click "Brush" to open the panel so you can change the characteristics of the brush tip.
4. Select "Brush Tip Shape" in the column on the left, then set the "Size" to around 25 pixels, the "Roundness" to 15 percent and the "Spacing" to 965 percent. You may need to adjust the spacing slightly if you change the size of the brush tip.
5. Click on the foreground color swatch and click within the Color Picker to choose a shade. Choose white, or a color that compliments the color of your leather image.
6. Create a new layer by clicking the icon at the bottom of the Layers panel that resembles a piece of paper.
7. Click and drag horizontally in the document window to draw a line of stitches. Hold down the "Shift" key if you want to keep the line straight.
8. Go to the base of the Layers panel, click on the "Add a Layer Style" button and choose "Bevel and Emboss" from the pop-up menu. Change the "Size" to 6 pixels and set the "Soften" level to 4 pixels
9. Select "Drop Shadow" from the list on the left, set the "Distance" to 1 pixel, the "Spread" to zero and the "Size" to 1 pixel.
10. Click "OK" to apply the "Bevel and Emboss" and "Drop Shadow" effects.
11. Go to "Filter," pick "Texture" and select "Texturizer." Change the "Texture" setting to "Burlap." Adjust the "Scaling" to 50 percent and the "Relief" to "9," then click "OK."
12. Create a vertical line by dragging the horizontal layer down to the "Create a new Layer" icon to make a copy. Next, go to "Edit," "Transform" and choose "Rotate 90 degrees CW."
13. Complete the straight sections of the sewing marks by copying and pasting the layers, then use the Move tool to position them on your image.
Curved Sewing Marks
14. Go to the Tools panel and select the Paintbrush. In the Options bar, click on the Brush Presets panel and choose a hard round brush, then adjust the brush tip size to around 10 pixels.
15. Create a new layer, then click and drag with the Paintbrush to draw the curved lines in your design.
16. Choose the "Eraser" tool and pick the same brush tip and size you used for the Paintbrush.
17.Erase portions of the curved line to make it look like stitches. Be careful to keep the spaces even.
18. Go to the layer containing the straight segment of sewing marks and right click. Select "Copy Layer Style" from the menu.
19. Right click the layer with the curved stitches and choose "Paste Layer Style" to add the "Bevel and Emboss" and "Drop Shadow" effects.
20. Choose "Filter" and select "Texturizer" from the top of the menu to apply the filter using the same settings you applied to the straight sewing marks.
21. Click the "Create a new Layer" icon. Drag the new layer below the layers with the sewing marks.
22. Press "D" to set the colors to default, with black as the foreground color.
23. Select the Paintbrush, and using a hard round brush tip, paint with black at the end of each stitch to create indentations.
24. Change the layer mode to "Multiply" and reduce the opacity to 75 percent.
Tags: sewing marks, Bevel Emboss, Drop Shadow, hard round, hard round brush, Layer Style
