Old Fashioned Fan

Overview

In this tutorial I’m going to be showing you how to draw an old fashioned fan in Photoshop CS3.

Step 1

First we are going to start out with the wire encasing the fan. Create a new document fill the background with white and create a new layer. Hit D on your keyboard, this sets the foreground and background color to the default color. Select the Ellipse Tool (U) hold down shift, click and drag to create a circle. Mine is about 390px wide.

Step 2

Select all the anchors on the circle, hit command+c (control+c on windows), now command+v then command+t, this opens Free Transform. Hold down Alt+Shit and click and drag one of the corners of the Transform box. Make the circle a little bit smaller then the outer circle. After you are done with the transformation hit enter. Make sure you have the Pen Tool selected (P) then click the Subtract From Area which is located in the Options tool bar.

Step 3

Next, create four blades for the fan using the Pen Tool (P), with #464646 for the color. Then create a circle in the middle using the Ellipse Tool (#333333)

Step 4

Using the pen tool draw six wires in front of the fan blades

Step 5

Select the center ellipse in the layers window, command click on it to make a selection around it. Click Select->Modify->Contract enter 1px. Create a new layer above the ellipse (Command+Shift+Alt+N) fill it with white, apply another contraction but this time by 5px. Hit delete. Command+Click the new layer and create a new layer. Select the Gradient Tool (G) and click the Reflected Gradient. Hit D then X. Now click about three fourths of the way down the circle and drag to around the bottom edge of the circle. Set the layer opacity to 22%

Step 6

Next, draw a circle below all the other layers then make four smaller circles inside of that one. Play around with contracting and drawing gradients using the techniques used in Step 5

Step 7

In this step were going to draw the base, Select the pen tool and draw the base, use the the ellipse tool to draw the bottom of the base. To create the reflection on the base select the Elliptical Marquee Tool (M) draw an ellipse, apply a Gaussian Blur (Filters->Blur-Gaussian Blur) and then use the Transform Tool and select Warp to transform it to fit the bend of the base.

Final Step

The final step really isnt a step but instead of going on about putting the final touches on it just play around with what you have so far, i added a few shadows on the middle of the fan blades to give it a slight bevel look, I also added the words in the center of the fan, the font used is “Museo”.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and learned some techniques from it. Thanks for reading!