Last week Schenk challenged me to an MSPaint vs. Photoshop match. The goal was to draw a ping pong paddle. I went into great detail of my methods here. In response, Ryan decided to make up a little how to that explains his methods for creating a Photoshop masterpiece.

Without further ado….
How do draw a ping pong paddle in 9 easy steps!

Step 1. Drawing in perspective is entirely too hard. So do begin with, draw the shape of a ping pong paddle head-on, it’s much easier this way. Note that this is a shape layer, I will be using shape layers exclusively in this tutorial.

Step 2. Once you’ve created the outline of the paddle, duplicate the layer twice, and adjust these duplicated shapes accordingly to create the rubber surface of the paddle and the handle. You can see that once I got the shape right, I made the rubber red and the handle a lighter shade of brown.

Step 3. I always need a little help with perspective, so I drew a rectangle shape layer, and used the Perspective transform tool (Edit-> Transform -> Perspective) to create a plane that the paddle will eventually be resting on.

Step 4. Select all your paddle layers (this only works in PS CS2 and above), and using the rotate tool (Edit -> Transform -> Rotate), rotate your paddle counter-clockwise.

Step 5. Using the Perspective or Free Transform tool, put your paddle into the perspective of the plane you drew in Step 3.

Step 6. I’ve resized the paddle a little smaller, the size that I want my icon to be, and I chopped off some of the handle that got elongated by the Perspective transform tool.

Step 7. To give the illusion of depth, I duplicated the Blade layer, made it darker brown, and offset it below and to the left the original blade. I also tweaked the Handle layer a little bit to create an overlapping effect over the rubber.

Step 8. This is where all the magic happens, and why I like to use shape layers, because you can mess with the effects endlessly. You can see I’ve added a drop shadow to the layer created in Step 7, a gradient and faint white highlight to the Rubber layer, and a gradient and embossing to the Handle layer.

Step 9. To finish things up and complete the illusion of a 3d object, I drew a light brown ellipse on the end of the handle, a dark brown rectangle through it for the blade of the paddle, and a dark brown arc where the handle tapers down to the rubber. And that’s a wrap.

Guadalajara has five A’s. Can anyone think of any other funky cities or countries with multiple repeated letters? Patrick?

Other than having to wake up at 3:30am, the trip south was pretty straight forward. I flew to Atlanta for the Guadalajara connection. The food on the trip over the border was delicious… there was this brownie that had Oreo chunks in it. Oreo chunks in a brownie. Pure Genius.

Once I arrived I took a taxi over to the holiday inn, which is very nice. There’s some funky art on the wall and the colors make the room feel light and calming.

Guadalajara is loaded with advertising billboards. They are everywhere. Most appear to be advertising clothes with pictures of spathic women and comments about ‘la ropa de las estrellas.’

The weather is warm, but not as bad as CT this morning where walking to the car felt like wading through waist deep water. The people are friendly and the taxi driver said tomorrow there would be lluvia.

I’ll take some pictures and post them up tomorrow night.