Cell-Shade A Car

Hi there. This tutorial will show you how to cell-shade a car in Photoshop or in any other 2d painting program. The program you use will HAVE to have a layer option, so Window's Paint wont work. First of all, find a picture of a car you would like to paint from the Internet or wherever. I chose this Plymouth Barracuda I found online because it looks sweet.

Ok, open up your image into Photoshop or another paint program, which supports layers. I'm using Photoshop 7 so I will be explaining it in terms of Photoshop, if you're using another paint program, you will have to figure out where the buttons that I will be talking about are located. After you open your image, you will have your layers looking like the first pic. Make a new layer, and name it "Outline"; by double clicking the name.

Ok, now you select the Polygonal Lasso Tool and select the entire car, be careful and go slow, you don't want any jagged edges, you want the curves to be as smooth as possible. After you select everything this is how the edge of the car should look. It should have the marching dots going around it. Now go to the menu Select>Inverse, and then press the delete key, this should make the background white, IF you have white selected as your background color in the color palette. After you turn the background white, go to Select>Inverse again to select only the car.

Ok, now comes the semi-difficult part: (There are two ways to do this read both first) Select the "Outline"; layer, and with the whole car selected, get the Polygonal Lasso Tool again, press the "Alt"; button and go around and deselect everything inside the car and you want to leave a line outside. It is hard to explain, but you want to make an outline of the car. Remember, to make the car look more interesting, you want to make the line vary in thickness. For example, for the front of the car and hood should have a thicker line than the back of the car and the antenna. Here are a couple of examples.

Now, here's an easier way, but you wont get those lines with the varying thickness. If you have the car selected, fill it all with black, then go to Select>Modify>Contract. You can contract it between 1-3 pixels depending on how big your image is. Then press the delete key. The end result is an outline of the car but with the same thickness all around. Doesn't look as good as if you did it manually.

Ok, after you outline the silhouette of the car, you might want to see how you did without the original car picture in the way. Firstly, we have to get rid of the background layer. Select the original layer where the car is on, select everything on it with the Rectangular select tool, copy the selection. Make a new layer, and name it "Original Car"; and paste it into that layer, so now you can delete the "Background"; layer and it wont affect your car. Now, to put in the white layer, make a new layer, name it "White"; and put it behind the "Original Car"; layer and fill it with white color with the Paint Bucket Tool. These are what you will use to do this step, and the end result. Now, if you want to see your outline with the white background, simply click on the picture of the eye on the "Original Car"; layer. What this does is hide the layer, if you click on it again, the layer will become visible again.

If you did everything correct, you should have about what I have here in this picture.