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!

Why use a Pen tool to draw or make selection? Because it gives you better control and higher precision that other tools cannot give you.  

Pen tool can be intimidating at first but once you learn it everything you touch with have a more professional look. You will get a clean and accurately outlined selection on all your photo. A pen path can also be saved within a .jpg file for use with other software!

Activate the Pen tool with the Tool Box or hit P on your keyboard.

Click and Drag to create your first point, you will see two Direction Handles once you start dragging, they control the curvature on either side of the control points, and this is NOT the actual path. Your path will appear once you make the second click.

Hold Alt/Option while you are dragging if you need a sharp corner, or go back to a previously created handle and hold the Alt/Option key(note that your mouse icon turn into a > shape) than drag the handle around, a sharp corner will be created.

If you’ve miss placed the anchor and need to move it around, Hold the Ctrl/Command key than drag an anchor point. Notice the mouse icon turns to a black triangle in the picture below.

Clicking anywhere on Line will add point; you will see a plus sign next to your pen icon.

Clicking on existing anchor point of delete it

Clicking the first anchor point again will close the curve, you will notice a circle appears next to your pen icon.

Holding Shift will snap to handle angle of 45 degrees angle

After you break the handle you can still have the handle on both side move relative to each other by holding Ctrl/command and alt/option at the same time.

Use Direction Selection Tool or A on your keyboard to select your path after you are done.

Ctrl/Command & Alt/Option click on the anchor point will reset the curve handles.

Types of Path – You can create Create Shape Layer (first Icon on top) or Path (second icon). If you set it to Shape Layer, you will be able to access the Shape through the layer pallet, you can change the color and opacity of this layer as you would with any layer items. If you set it to Path, you will need to look for it in the path pallet, you will be able to save your path in your .jpg and use it a selection to outline objects in your photo.

If you select Path option you can add Shape and subtract shape using these icons. The third icon is for intersection, so your second path need to intersect the first for this to work. Or you can exclude the intersection only with the last icon.

Softer selection, under the menu in path pallet, you can set feathering to soften the selection edge.

After you created your selection wit the Path tool you can use the Refine Edge tool to create a even more accurate selection. Read my article about Refine Edge here.

This is pretty much the basic of the Pen tool, if you have any other tips about the Path tool please share it with me in the comment, thanks!

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.