iMouse – creating Apple mouse

Simple and elegant. Apple mouse. Is there anyone, who doesn’t want graphic like that? Let’s have a look at creating this mouse in Adobe Photoshop.

In case you don’t have it on your table, take a look how does the mouse looks like.

According to fact, that most of material is transparent plastic which is reflecting environment the mouse is at. Simplify the work by putting the mouse on a white background. So it’s gonna be almost all white.

Start with a new document and Rounded Rectangle Tool should provide base shape of a mouse. Set the Radius at 100 px. Radius should be greater then width of a mouse – so the top and bottom of a mouse is fully rounded. Color is light grey – #E5E5E5.

Add contour to our shape. Effect Outer Glow, set in light grey color #DBDBDB and size 3 px. Size is actually two pixels, because Spread is set to 47%.

To darken the contour as it goes down, add effect Drop Shadow. Set its Angle to 90°, Distance 1 px and Size to 1 px. Spread 100 % makes effect not to be blurred.

If satisfied, set the Opacity to 10 %.

“Transparent” sides of a mouse provides Inner Glow effect, Size 10 px, color white. It is not transparent, it is only white border. But it’s fine for us.

For plastic look start adding reflections and shadows. We can use layer effect on the first reflection, Gradient Overlay, Style: Linear, gradient from white to transparent should be fine. Set the Angle so the glow goes from left bottom corner to the right spot. Adjust the size if neccessary – property Scale.

Other reflections must be hand-made. Close the dialog, create new layer and draw two linear gradients as shown on next picture. From grey (#A7A7A7) to transparent.

Group this layer with the previous one using Ctrl + G (newer versions Ctrl + Alt + G) and shadows are here. Notice that the layer acts like it was under the layer effects before. It means it doesn’t touch places, where is Inner glow. That is why it’s better to use this than adding a mask to layer.

Not enough reflections? Add next layer we draw white to transparent gradient into (on next picture background set to grey just to see the gradients).

And again group it with previous layer. As shown below.

Mouse is completed, all we need is apple symbol. Easiest way is to find a font that contains this symbol – and it is font InterSymb. Color of apple is #A9A9A9.

Make the logo more visible by creating contoure and darker shadow inside. Drop Shadow to start …

…and continue with Outer Glow, as shown on next picture…

…well, maybe adding some Inner Glow makes the right effect …

…and finish at the Inner Shadow effect. Set to go from right bottom (as a shadow on a mouse). In left top part of an apple is created a little reflection – this provides us a strong feeling, it’s in the surface of a mouse.

Compared to the original picture, we are still missing a little something on a sides. Simulate it like that – soft white brush and click in the areas shown in the picture below. Select transparency of a layer – Ctrl + click on a layer – and delete this selection from our layer. Then again select transparency of mouse layer, widen the selection by 2 pixely (so the reflection is only on the contour), create transparency addon and delete selection again.

Copy this layer (Ctrl + J), invert (Ctrl + I) and move slightly downwards. You can turn down the opacity, if you want to.

Add a shadow under mouse. Into new layer draw an ellipse and fill with black color.

Blur the layer with Motion Blur set to 0 ° and then blur again with Gaussian Blur. Those easy steps bring some realistic effects.

We could think the work is done, but.. it’s not . At the beginning we said, that mouse reflects everything around. So let’s create at least one reflection, shall we? Ok, let’s create a Window reflection (ironic, huh), which is one of the most common reflection, but still – Windows are the most powerful source of light in dark room.

Use the Pen tool to draw deformed window shape, as shown below.

Add typical window details with Pen tool like shown on next picure and substract it from original shape.

Add a mask to layer and draw a gradient (black to white) in it. Exactly as shown below!

And now, the work is done. Good job. Good luck to you all !

Note: Next picture shows the mouse on dark background. It doesn’t look bad neither, huh? But it loses effect of a transparent contours.. so if you don’t have enough, figure out how to create transparent contours on a dark background …