How to Draw a Crystal Ball

Artist: Dawn / October 9, 2012
How to Draw a Crystal Ball

Step 1.


Start off with a large circle like so for the crystal glass or ball.

Step 2.


You will now draw out the base like so, and when you're done you should have a straight lined pedestal that the ball sits on.

Step 3.


Now that your entire crystal ball is drawn, all you have to do is all all the magical stars, spots, swirls, twinkles, and mystery. Erase the mistakes if you made any.

Step 4.


Here is the crystal ball when you are done. color it in, then add a witch, or a gypsy.

Step 5.


Alright, before I end this tutorial, I'm going to give you a few digital art tips and techniques that you can integrate into your art. First off, I'm using Photoshop CS6 to create the soft gradients and color choices. It's best to use a Wacom tablet    

Step 6.


Then, take a lighter shade of the original blue from the orb, and highlight the MIDDLE of the crystal. DO NOT go any brighter as the next steps will create the 'shiny' and 'glassy' effect.

Step 7.


Then, taking my lineart layer (the crystal orb layer lines), I color them an offset shadowed tone that matches the orb.

Step 8.


Now, to prepare for the future highlights, you must know two tools that's going to aid you with the lighting of the orb. First, we'll be using the Lasso Tool quite a lot, to gradient sections with whatever highlight. Make sure you have the single rec   

Step 9.


Select an area of the orb you want to highlight with your lasso tool. In the next step, you're going to take your 'Gradient Tool' (presented in the next tip) and drag the mouse upwards to create a fine yet soft gradient. The brightest part of the cry   

Step 10.


This is the gradient tool which is basically a gradient fills a selected color in depending on the amounts of times you click and drag (which also depends on your gradient opacity settings).

Step 11.


So now I'm just using more gradients to create a soft highlight above the crystal ball.

Step 12.


Then, taking two custom brushes, I take a hard round brush and draw dots around the crystal ball to create a mystical magic effect. I then take a soft round brush and lightly dab some soft highlights around the hard sparkles.

Step 13.


This is pretty much the steps I take to create the sparkles. I take a hard round brush and dab a sparkle, then a soft round brush much larger than the original size, and lightly dab a highlight around that hard circle shape.

Step 14.


Then, using a larger soft brush again, I highlight a glow around the crystal ball to create a pretty magical effect. Then, taking a smaller soft brush, I dab in a few faint sparkles around the orb.

Step 15.


Lastly, I add a setting table and tweak the colors. I hope you guys learned a few helpful tricks on how to color a crystal ball in Photoshop digitally. Thanks so much for viewing and let me know if you tried this!

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Details

Artist: Dawn
Date Added: October 9, 2012
Steps: 15
Favorited: 1 (view)
Views: 0 in last hour, 8 in last day, 42 in last week, 27788 total
Comments: 0
Tags: how to draw balls
Description: I bet you're thinking that this is going to be just an ordinary tutorial on "how to draw a crystal ball". What you don't know is that I have included a coloring tut as well. The ball that you will be drawing is filled with all the mystic designs that give the crystal ball it's famed fortune telling ability. I had a lot of ideas as to how I wanted the crystal ball to come out or "appear", but in the end I chose a simple design that will have everybody enjoying the fun. So I hope you like this tut on drawing a crystal ball. If you have any other ideas just let me know. Adios people!

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