Plaid Skirt Tutorial


1. Open the base you want to use.Create a new layer called "Skirt".	2. If you're stuck for colours, have a look at House of Tartan for some inspiration. Set your foreground colour to a dark shade of whatever you want the base colour of the skirt to be. Using the Paintbrush tool, draw in the outline of the skirt.	3. Using the Paintbrush & Eraser tools, tidy up the outline to ensure that it is smooth & 1 pixel thick at all points.

4. Flood Fill the interior of the skirt with a slightly lighter shade of the outline colour (you will need to ensure that any gaps in the skirt outline are filled before doing this).	5. Create a new layer called Horizontal. Set your foreground to the colour you want for your horizontal stripes. Draw a series of horizontal (side-to-side) lines - about 3 pixels thick - on your skirt. Tip This goes a little quicker if you increase the size of the Paintbrush.	6. Create a new layer called Vertical. Set the foreground colour to the colour you want for the alternate pattern & draw in a series of vertical (top-to-bottom) stripes.

7. Now, this takes some experimentation. Drop the opacity of both the Vertical & Horizontal layers a little until you get an effect that you like.	8. If you're happy with the skirt, you can leave it as it is, but I want to add a little shading. Hide all the layers on your doll apart from those involved in your skirt.	9. Right-click on one of the visible layers & select Merge/Merge Visible. You will be left with a single merged layer from however many you had before.

10. Click on the Retouch tool & use approximately the same settings as above (this will vary depending on the size of your doll).	11. Carefully Darken the area behind each pleat, as shown above.	12. Change the Darken RGB to Lighten RGB & the size to about 3, but keep all others settings the same as before. Add a little highlight to the front pleating & to each of the other pleats/folds.

Your plaid skirt is complete! Once you get the hang of this technique, you can become more adventurous. Try varying the size or the lines or add more colours on different layers & see what happens.
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