Quick Capes

quick capes
Part 1: As always, use your wireframe to lay down your base colour.

Part 2: Using the area you’ve already mapped out, on a new layer, fill the area white, and airbrush some black edges.

Part 3: Still using the black airbrush, sketch in some curves, preferably taking your time, not like the quick job we have here 😉 use a nice thickness to get the main lines in, and fill with smaller lines.

Part 4: Gaussian blur your marked out layer by 2.5 pixels, and set the layer style to multiply.

Optional Part: If you are planning on putting a logo on your cape, make a copy of this layer, set the layer style to normal, add a white background and then copy-paste into a new document, save this document as something like wave.psd

Part 5: if you require a slightly heavier shadow, duplicate your second layer, gaussian blur by another 2.5 pixels and lower opacity to about 40%.

Part 6: Duplicate your second layer again, gaussian blur by a further 7.5 pixels and making sure this layer is above any others, set the layer style to hard light, you may now want to lower the opacity on this layer.

Part 7: If your adding a logo now is the time to place it.

Part 8: Move your logo layer so it is ontop of your base colour, then select filter – distort – displace, I ran this filter at horizontal and vertical displacement of 2 (it will ask you to select a file, this is where your displacement psd comes in), I then used an eraser at 50% opacity to remove some of the highlight from the hard light layer from ontop of the logo.

And then it’s done 🙂

I know there are much better methods out there for making capes, but this is an easy to do way to make your own capes with a technique than can be applied to things such as baggy shirts and pants

And for people interested in dissecting the piece:
Cape PSD
Wave PSD