Everyone is just dying to learn how to draw a ceramic tea cup complete with semi reflective surface, liquid texture and steam coming out of it, now you get to see how it can be done! If you are not one of the people I just described, no worries, you can still stick around and take note and use the ideas here and apply it to some other less exciting subjects.

First step, turn on Grid under View menu to help you draw a perfect symmetric cup, I use oval marquee to draw the top part and Pen tool for the bottom part in a separate layer. Check out my Pen tutorial if you are not sure how to use it.

Double click on the layer icon to open the Layer effect menu and apply Bevel and Satin - For Bevel I use 144% on Depth, 70 for Size, and 16 for Soften. I also adjusted the position of the global light to the right. For Satin I use 70%Opacity and change the shape of the curve. Play around with the settings and also the curve shape to get the result you desire.

For the oval shape, which I will use as the rim and also the interior of the cup, I applied inner bevel to give the rim a thickness and gradient for the shadow and highlight. I selected the lower half of the oval with marquee tool and gave it a slight blur to to soften the transition between the rim and the body.

Now select both the rim and body layer and drag it to the new layer icon to duplicate them, with the duplicates still selected, merge them by going to menu Layers - Merge Layer. Apply Chrome filter in the Filter Gallery. Give the Chrome layer a 20% opacity and change blending mode to Multiply (click here to see what blending modes are)

Draw another oval for the liquid and fill the color of your choice in a brand new layer, delete or mask out the area that are not suppose to be visible. Open layer effect by double clicking the layer icon and apply gradient like I did.

To draw the steam, get a new layer and paint with a soft brush and delete half of it like the first picture so that it has a hard edge and fades into nothing.

Duplicate this layer and rearrange it so they have different sizes.

Originally I used white as the color but I inverse the color so that when I go into Filter - Liquify, I can see the paint easier. Use the circular twril brush and play around with the shape of the steam. After you are done apply Filter-Gaussian blur to it to make it softer and fix it up with smear tool and erase unwanted area.

With some color adjustment and painting in a few high light manually you get this following picture. If you've decided to follow my tutorial, please show me what you got! And if you have any question or comments feel free to posted below. Thanks!

Here is the video of the sketching process, you can read below for details.

I start with a grayish background for mid tone and just start sketching the shape of the face.

I didn't really sketch everything in detail because I will leave that for later, but for now I blocked in some of the shadow areas to make the shape more three dimensional.

Next I blocked in some highlights and the basic shape of the hair. At this point I have a better view of what the final picture will look like, so it is good to start make some major changes before its too late such as the shape of the head, position of the eyes and so on.

Than I added some streaks of hair to show the direction of the hair flow.

After you are done blocking in the basic shapes and final positioning of the facial features you can start defining the detail on the face.

In the final picture I brighten up the drawing and even out the tone and added fine streaks of hair.

Here is a video of me painting Iron Man in Photoshop. Again its probably pretty fast but you get the idea, comments and critiques are welcome!!

I sketched it out with plain black line than shade it in to get a feel of the volume. After I am satisfied with the volume I went in and painted the details including the reflections. Once in awhile I will tone down everything using the level tool so I can add more darker shades and brighter highlights because I often get carry away with using too much highlights and shadows. You will notice that I did not really color it, instead, I changed the color using gradient adjustment, I colored one layer to red and a second layer to gold because thats pretty much all the colors he has, than cut it out so I get two different colors. Than I use dodge and burn to bring out some of the back lights. So as you can see, you do not need to paint everythin, Photoshop can help you get to where you want faster.