Tutorial: Giving Layered Images a Doodled Look

This is another really simple tutorial for beginners, but it’s so useful (and fast and easy!) when you really want a doodled look.

Most of you know that I create commercial use products under the name That Girl.  The vast majority of my products are layered images that come as PSD and TIF files and are used by other designers, but you don’t have to be a designer to use CU stuff!

I made a little cake specifically for us to use in this tutorial.  You can download it here:

Step 1. Open up your cake image and either duplicate it or select all of the layers and drag them onto a new canvas, then close the original.

Here’s what we’re starting with (click the images to enlarge them):

It’s kind of cute and you could easily merge it just like that and use it as clipart, or you could recolor and add styles to each of the layers to make them look exactly how you want them to.  But we’re going to give it a doodled look!

Step 2. Select the top layer and double click it.  When the Layer Style window pops up, click on Stroke.  I’m going to make my stroke about 6 pixels in size and change the color to #606060 because straight black is a little too harsh for me.  Choose whatever color you think looks good!  Then click ok and apply your stroke.

Here’s where we’re at:

Step 3. In your layers palette, right click on the layer you just added the stroke to and select Copy Layer Style.

Step 4. Still in your layers palette, select all of the other layers.  You can either hold down the Ctrl key and click each of the layers individually or else select the top layer, hold down the Shift key, and click on the bottom layer.

Step 5. Right click and select Paste Layer Style to apply the stroke to all of the layers.

And here’s what we have:

Step 6. Merge all of your layers and save!

I added a drop shadow, plus a grungy overlay to mine to rough it up a little and added some texture with the Texturizer filter:

So what do you think?  I personally like the doodle look a lot, but mostly for things I want to look like stickers or cut out paper.  If I want them to have some dimension then I prefer them without the stroke and just work with styles instead.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this tutorial!  I’d love to know what you think.