This post is dedicated to my brother, who loves to draw and now picking up digital coloring on his own. He asked me on how to make a metal appear shiny in the drawing. So I’ve come out with this basic guide. Hope this will be helpful for budding artists out there!

Note that this guide utilize Adobe Photoshop, however this technique can be implemented in any graphic editing suites.

First of all, let’s take a look at the sample image that is given to me:

The part that we are going to apply the effect is on the wrist-guard of this character.

First, we start by opening this image in Adobe Photoshop, and creating a new layer above it:

Now, with the Polygonal Lasso tool (). Click and hold on the Lasso Tool and choose the Polygonal Lasso tool:

Then, draw some reflection shapes on the new layer. Don’t worry about the shape for now. Just make sure it covers enough of the area you want to apply the effect on:

Once you’ve completed the lasso tool, you will have a selection like follows:

Now, click Edit -> Fill…

On the dialog box that pops up, choose “white“, then press OK

Now you should have something like this:

Select the bottom layer, and use the Magic Wand () tool to select the area you want to apply this effect on:

Now, go back to the top layer, and on the Layer palette, click the “Add Layer Mask” button:

You will then see something like this!

Play with the top layer’s Opacity settings to tweak the effect further:

And there, you have it! Note that this is only a basic way of doing the shiny effect. Here’s the outcome:

Further Enhancement
You can also make the shiny effect a little bit enhanced by adding a ‘Gaussian Blur‘ effect on the top layer:

The outcome will be something like this:

Have fun!

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