Meet Mr. Giraffe.  He is my little creation I dreamed up while playing in photoshop.  Yes, photoshop is great for playing with actual pictures, but what about creating some cute art?  Oh, yes sir-eeee! If you would like to walk through the steps to create your own one-of-a-kind cartoon friend then keep reading.  It is a fun creative art project for those of us incapable of drawing or painting with ‘real’ paints and pencils.  :)  Hope you enjoy this tutorial!

Step: 1- I took the paint brush tool and simply drew my guy.  Now, I am no artist, but because photoshop is so forgiving anyone can create a cute cartoon friend.  If you mess up that is what the amazing eraser tool is for!

Step 2:  As you can see he needed a bright fun background so using the ‘fill’ tool which looks like the little paint bucket, I decided on a bright red, clicked and voila….instant color.  Now, to add a little texture to it, I then went in and placed a texture over the entire thing and again with my eraser tool, erased the texture from the giraffe, so all that remained was some texture  over my red background. Side Note:  Not sure why it is showing up orange on here, but it is still the bright red.

Step 3:  I decided I wanted to give him a little texture, so I found a cute green polka dot paper and once I placed it over my giraffe, I simply erased all of the areas except for the ones I wanted to be green polka dotted.  Easy peasy!

Step 4:  And finally, I picked another color that I thought would work well with my chosen color palette and, once again, used the paint bucket to fill in his spots, head, etc.

So, there you have it….

Just to spotlight him even more I placed him here in this template at different sizes to show off his cuteness.   And, why stop with one little guy when there are SO many that you can play with!