The Sketchpad - WetPaint

Making Glass Orbs with Paint.NET

Glass Orbs - Page 1 | Page 2

Paint.NET Tutorials - Orbs

Well, I've received a special request to make a tutorial on how to make glassy orbs with Paint.NET. So, here it is!

Example Orb

I made this one as an example:

It was made using Paint.NET, though it took a while to perfect. The thing of it is, orbs like this can be for many uses. This one was made as an example avatar, so it has a design in the center denoting the users user name. Depending upon the purpose for which you intend to use it, a center design may be very different, or may not be needed at all. Therefore, the bulk of this tutorial will show you how to make the orb itself, and I'll touch on the center as a side point, leaving the center part mainly up to your imaginiation.

Please Note: This tutorial takes advantage of some features in Paint.NET v2.5 and later. You will need to upgrade to Paint.NET veraion 2.5 or later to follow all the steps mentioned here. But, since 2.6 is in final stable form, I don't see that as too much of a problem. To get it please visit the Paint.NET downloads page here: Paint.NET Download Portal

Let's Get Started

Makin' Orbs

First things first, you'll need Paint.NET open. By definition, an orb is spherical, so it'd be best to create a new document with equal height and width. Since I don't want to use up all my bandwidth and avatars are usually smaller, I'll go with 100px x 100px.

Now that we have our image, we'll need to establish the body color of the orb. To do this, I'm going to employ the same procedure I used in the Gradient tutorial; make two new layers, fill one with the color of the start of the fade, and fill the other with the color of the end of the fade. You don't have to use a gradient for the background, but I like it because it gives a sense of depth and light refraction that is common to glass objects.

If you're not going to use a gradient for your background color, you can skip this paragraph. Now then: Once you have your desired terminating colors filled in, one in each layer, erase half of the fill in the top layer (Layer 3 if you haven't renamed it), from one of the canvas edges to about the halfway mark. Alternately, you could select half of the layer and fill just that. Then Gaussian blur the layer from which you just deleted. If you want your fade to go perfectly from end to end, set the radius to half the canvas height, 50px for this 100px square example. Once you've done that, it should look something like this, albeit colored differently: (If you're not using a gradient, it won't look like this...)

If you're using a gradient, flatten your image after you've created the fade via the Image -> Flatten command. Then, add a new layer, select all of the Background layer and cut/paste the gradient into the new layer. This will allow you to add a custom background color later. If you're using a solid color, your color will already be on one layer, so you don't have to do this step.

Now we can all join together, gradients and solids alike! With your color layer selected, switch to your Ellipse Selection tool and create a perfectly circular selection several pixels away from the edges of the canvas. I used 5px from each edge by hovering the cursor at 50px x 5px and holding [Shift] while dragging to 50px x 95px (the current pixel position of the cursor is displayed in the lower-right corner of the main app window). Then, invert the selection by pressing [Ctrl]+i or selecting Edit -> Invert Selection, and delete everything but the circle in the center.

Now, you'll notice that the edges aren't smooth. That's because Paint.NET doesn't yet have anti-aliased selection edges. However, there is a fix for this: Under Effercts -> Blurs, select Radial Blur, and set the degrees input to 4px. As long as your circle is in the exact center, the radial blur will smear the edges around in a circle, making them appear anti-aliased. You can see the difference in this side-by-side:

Now that you have the background, let's make it look glassy and round. To do this, we'll add white circles as highlights. Since these circles need to fade out to look realistic, we'll have to employ a similar technique to the one we used earlier: Create a new layer, use the Rectangular Select tool to select the the top half of the image, fill it with white, deselect, Gaussian blur it (this time, let's do 40px), draw a circle selection in the exact center (20px from each side), invert the selection, delete the extra outside the circle, and use the radial blur (at 4 degrees). Then, move it up to the top of the orb by selecting it with the Rectangle Select tool, switching to the Move Selected Pixels tool, and drag it up to the top of the circle. With the Move Selected Pixels tool still selected, grab the handle on the bottom and squish the circle by dragging up a bit. You can resise it as you see fit. For this example, I thought it looked better a little bigger, so I scaled it up but dragging the lower-right handle over while holding [Shift], then recentering the larger highlight.

Now, here's where you'll encounter a little quirk with Paint.NET: When you scale a circle with blurred edges, it likes to add black pixels around the edges. So, you'll have to go in with the eraser and delete each one. Make sure you have a small brush and be very careful to not delete any of the white. It's easiest to do it by unchecking the visibility checkbox of the main orb color/gradient layer and filling the background with white. That way, any dark pixels of the highlight layer show up very well against the background, and are easier to delete. Alternately, you could use Layers -> Adjustments -> Brightness/Contrast and raise the brightness until the pixels are all white. Once you've cleaned up the edges, recheck the visibility checkbox of the orb color layer, and it should look like this:

Now, let's add some lightening at the bottom. To do this, let's just duplicate the existing highlight layer and flip it using Layers -> Flip -> Vertical, then resizing it to a much smaller size. Center it at the bottom, then blur it some and drop the opacity to make it look soft. For this example, I used the Motion Blur at 4px twice, first vertically, then horizontally, because this method lost less quality than a Gaussian blur of equal value. I then dropped the opacity to 200, and this is what you get:

And that's a basic orb! Now comes the part that's mainly up to you. Depending upon what you need, you'll do one of many different things. Due to some questions I've had on the message board, I've made a Page 2, which goes into further detail on how to make the insides of avatars. Since this tutorial was requested for avatars, I made a few examples. I have also uploaded the .pdn files so you can take a look at the layers and how they were put together. Basically, I draw out the sections with either a shape tool in outline mode or the line tool (make sure this extends all the way to the image border or you paint on extentions that do) and use the magic wand tool to select and erase the part of each layer I don't want showing in the final one. To download a .pdn, click on the appropriate avatar:

Glass Orbs - Page 1 | Page 2