 Tea Cup
Hiya realneed4speed,
You've got a good start there but because you asked for it...here are a few changes and how they were done.
First I moved the handle behind the cup body until the sort of vertical piece was hidden. I held down the command (control) key and clicked on the cup layer in the layers palette to load a selection of the cup body. Then I made the handle layer active and hit the delete key which eliminated the part behind the cup body. I moved the handle above the cup body in the layer pallet stacking order. Modification of the layer styles completed the handle. I eliminated the drop shadow as it was visually confusing and in the bevel and emboss changed the selection from up to down which made the look more 3D than cut into the background.
Next I changed the bottom of the cup. It needed to be curved. When you look at a cylinder, even a tapered cylinder, if you are looking at such an angle that one end is somewhat oval the other end must be so also. I accomplished that by using the oval marquee tool and drawing out a shallow marquee which looked the same as the top and just touched the edges and bottom of the cup. Inversing the selection allowed me to use the eraser tool and erase outside my bottom curve.
The third major step was to add some liquid to the cup. I made a new layer and again I used the marquee tool to draw out an oval parallel to the top edge of the cup which was made by your black oval. I command (control) clicked on the layer which had the black oval and that loaded the selection of that layer. Inversing the selection (shift + command + i) allowed me to delete the part of the 'liquid' layer which was overlapping the 'cup's top' layer.
The next step I cheated and used the AlienSkin Eye Candy 4000 Smoke filter to make the steam. Maybe someone knows how to make a brush to do steam but I'm a cheater. Finally I added a background layer of 50% grey just to show off the steam.
There is one flaw still and that is in the shadow. You have to imagine how the lighting of your scene is going to work and make a shadow accordingly. While a drop shadow may work occasionally, often you need a perspective shadow to make things seem more realistic.
Good Luck!
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Experiment on a separate layer!
Linear Mode
