Motorcycle Rendering Tutorial for Photoshop, creating a 'photoreal' 2D motorcycle

From this point on you will be shading mostly, so you can hide your sketch guide layer that you have on top of your image.

Select the layer of the area that you want to shade (for example the fuel tank) and make sure you have 'Lock transparant pixels' turned on (it's the checkerboard icon next to the 'Lock:' text in your layers dialog). This will allow you to paint all you want without worrying that you paint outside of your coloured area. Because you locked transparant pixels you cannot paint on empty areas, meaning you can paint only in areas where you already have colour.

Paint the highlight and core shadow of each area on the same layer as the object is located. If you mess up, you can simply paint over the area again with the colour it used to be and all is restored. Don't use the eraser, it will simply fill the area that you erase with the background colour that you have set in your Toolbox. Simply use your airbrushes to paint until you are happy with the result. Remember, the bits of the bike that are near the top have a pretty strong highlight on top, the bits of the bike near the floor have a weaker highlight on top, but probably also a highlight from light reflected from the floor. Don't forget to add this effect, it will add a huge amount of realism in your image (you can see this clearly on the plastic bit below the blue fuel tank area).

Again, looking at reference pictures of all kinds of products, bikes and cars in studio setups will teach you a lot on where you can find highlights (don't confuse highlights with reflections though) and shadows. Having good reference around makes life a lot easier.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to be very lazy here
Doing complex shapes like this in a vector drawing program like Illustrator (I used Rhino here because it's great with curve matching and arrays) can really make the experimenting with shapes a lot easier.

You can do these shapes in Photoshop but it would be really time consuming and the end result is only visible after investing quite a bit of time. In Rhino it was just a matter of cutting up a circle in as much parts as I needed, drawing some curves to replace those parts and polar arraying them. I also matched their curvature and joined them to create a single nice flowing curve object.
It would seem this is a lot of work, but when you are a little familiar with Rhino you will know this is actually really easy and a matter of just a few minutes before you can have a set of different versions to play with.

In the end I used Rhino to create the discbrake assembly, the rims of the wheels and the tire profile. You'll see those in later steps of this tutorial.

Scale down the imported curves (keep Shift pressed to make a nice uniform scale) and snap them to the wheel centers. Make sure you keep track of the layer order, or these will end up on the wrong end of the steering arms

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You'll notice that these imported curves have quite thick black lines. This might seem bad, but we can actually turn this into a plus because when we turn on 'lock transparant pixels' we can draw highlights and shadows on these curves.
Before we do this though we need to colour our shapes. Go to the layer where these shapes are on and use the magic wand to select the insides where you want your colour. Create a new layer while keeping your selection and fill that with the colour of your choice. Just make sure you keep each colour on a seperate layer so that you can easily make changes if you're not happy with the result.

We're now going to try to simulate a brushed steel look that you usually see on brake discs like this. All the painting is done on the layer used for colouring the front disc, so no seperate layers for reflections of shadows are used.. this is a simple object to colour so no need to make things overly complex.

You could use a noise filter here and use a radial motion blur as in reality this shading effect is used by tiny radial scratches, but if I'm being honest I don't think that's a very realistic look. The radially blurred noise would be good for bumpmaps in 3d software, but not for photoshop, because we're rendering the actual highlights of those scratches, not the scratches themselves. They are just too small to show up on shots like we're trying to mimic. So that only leaves the anisotropic effect, which is easily achieved by using a soft airbrush and streaking across the disc a couple of times. Try to achieve a nice and subtle effect.
One nice side effect with glossy surfaces is that they blur reflections. The reflection of the front fork for instance is easily made by using another soft airbrush and going over the area behind the fork. Again, just go for a subtle effect, just don't make the edges of the reflection too sharp. Notice that I call it a reflection, but you can just as well call it a shadow. In reality it would be a mix of both of course.