Hot on the heels of glass reflections, the most requested tutorials on the web today are the creation of realistic vectors of electronic equipment, namely high-profile devices like the iPhone or iPod touch. In this tutorial, from a white wall of nothing, we’ll create a realistic iPhone, taking advantage of the effects and techniques we learnt in the last tutorial as well as learning some new ones …

[Tutorial 001] – AVAILABLE HERE

By using gradients and layers, we can build up an iPhone, from scratch. Now you’ll have to stick with me on this one, as further into the tutorial, things can get pretty complicated.

First things, First
Before we start, your going to want to download Adobe Photoshop. If your already own Photoshop, great! – If not, no worries – a 30-day trial version of CS3 is still available here. CS4 (the latest version) is currently not available to trial. In order to access these pages properly, you’ll need to sign in with your Adobe account, or if you don’t yet have one,you can create one free of charge.

As I generally use Mac, the keyboard controls in this tutorial are going to be Mac-orientated.
Windows users, all you need to know is; CMD means CTL, Option means ALT and Backspace means DEL.

Step 1 – Create your Document
We’re going to create a new document. To do this, hold down CMD + SHFT + N. You can create this at whatever size that suits your needs. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to create a document sized 700 x 500 with a resolution of 120.

Step 2 – Fill the background
To do this, we’re going to use two colours. Our foreground colour is going to be #464646 and our background, #5B5B5B. Select your gradient tool by right clicking the paint bucket icon, and ensuring you have selected those two colours correctly, drag a gradient from the top of your canvas, to just past the mid point. This should create an Apple-esque backdrop for our iPhone vector.

Step 3 – Creating the Base
Create a new layer and name it as base. Select the Rectangle Marquee tool and draw a rectangle. Then navigate to Select > Modify > Smooth > and smooth the selection by 15. Fill this selection with pure White #FFFFFF. Right-click on the layer and select Blending Options > Gradient Overlay. Your left colour should be set to #8F9498 and right colour #000000 (Black). Set the blend mode to ‘Normal’, Opacity to 60, Style to Linear, Align: Yes, Angle -90 and scale to 100.

Step 4 – Creating Highlights
Create another layer (CMD + SHFT + N) and name it as ‘Highlights’. Using the Rectangle Marquee tool, draw a slightly smaller rectangle than your base. Then navigate to Select > Modify > Smooth > and smooth the selection by 17. Fill with #FFFFFF (Pure White).

Step 5 – The Bezel
Create another layer and name it ‘Bezel’. Using the Rectangle tool, draw a slightly smaller selection than the base. Then navigate to Select > Modify > Smooth > and smooth the selection by 15. Finally, fill this selection with pure White #FFFFFF.

Step 6 – Outline
Duplicate the ‘Highlights’ layer and name this new layer ‘Outline’. Go to Edit > Free Transform and make this layer vertically smaller than your ‘Highlights’ layer. Then navigate to Layer > Layer Style > Colour Overlay and set the color overlay to #1F2326.

Step 7 – The Surface
Create a new layer and name it as ‘Top Glass’. Then navigate to Select > Modify > Smooth > and smooth the selection by 15. Draw a rectangle that is around 10px smaller than your base layer. Fill the selection with a gradient running from #2D3037 to #000000.

You should now have something like this:

Step 8 – Home Button
Create a new layer and name it ‘Home Button’. Use the round Ellipse tool and drag a circle out near the bottom of the surface layer. Change your foreground color to #333333. Select the Pen tool and right-click on the circular path then select Stroke Path.

Step 9 – Speaker
Create a new layer and name it ‘Speaker’. Draw a rectangle with the rectangular marquee tool, and smooth it by 3 pixels. Fill the top half of the selection with #000000 and bottom half with #828384.

Step 9 – Screen
Create a new layer and name it ‘Screen’. Draw a rectangle at the center of the surface layer. Smooth the selection by 2, and fill with pure White #FFFFFF. Lower the opacity of the layer to 20%

Step 11 – Reflection
Finally, we’re going to duplicate all the layers we’ve created so far and create a reflection. To do this, select all the layers in your layers panel, by clicking and holding SHFT. After you’ve done that, navigate to Layers > Merge Layers, to merge all these layers together. Rename that layer ‘Reflection’. Then go to Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Finally go to Layer > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay, create a gradient which runs from #5B5B5B to #FFFFFF (transparent), select OK, and move the opacity of this layer down to 23%.

… and that’s it!

Here’s what I got:

Hope you enjoyed following me through this tutorial, and look out for more in the future weeks and months to come. Feel free to leave a comment, or send us your iPhone’s!

Not physically – although it would be nice… :)