This is the doll we're going to be making the skirt of.

Pick your base and place it on a new layer on your canvas. I usually have my canvas at 400x400 in size so I have plenty of room.

On a new layer I have drawn in red a circular base and the sides of the dress. This shows in 3D where the skirt would be placed. It helps you get a round looking skirt if you add in these lines.

You can see on this image and this image the circles that I drew round the bottom of the skirts with dotted lines representing where the back of the skirt would fall could we see it.

Create a new layer above the red frame. Then using your outline colour drawin in your skirt over the red frame. I always draw in all the fold lines. This way it means that the hemline at the bottom fits rather than just using a wobbly line as favoured by other tutorials. Don't worry about how messy it is. It will be cleaned up later.

Here are some 6 Shade Pallettes For you to use (6 shades is necessary for this technique)

Using the eraser tool erase all the fold lines inside the skirt as these are unnecessary because the folds are added back in later. Keep in mind however where the folds were and how they fell so that they can be added back later.

Hide the layer with the red frame on it and then go back to your skirt layer. Using your eraser tool again (at 1px thick) erase all stray pixels and clean up the lines.

On the side is the pallette I will be using. I have numbered the colours for convinence. Colour 1 is the outline. Use colour 4 to flood fill the dress (don't forget to close off around the hands in colour 4 too) I added a little bit of purple above the waist to create a dress with an empire waistline.

Use the magic wand tool to select all the flood filled areas. Hold down the skift key to get all the extra pixels for example between the fingers. It is also advisable to save this selection to alpha channel in case it is lost as it is a vital part of the shading technique.

Using an airbrush or paintbrush (I know paintbrush doesn't work this way in PSPX) Set it to size 1px and drop the opacity to only about 12 or 13. Then draw in the areas where the shadows are. The image above is an 'in progress' image. You need to keep layering the colour ontop of each other to get darker and lighter shades. When adding the shadows also add colour down the sides of the dress as otherwise it will feel slightly flat.

This is a the dress zoomed out after colour 3 has been added. I've removed the selction so you can see better but you shouldn't do that. The selection is what stops the colour from 'escaping' the outline. You should be able to see definate fold outlines though don't be too dissapoited because the shading isn't finished so the folds don't look too impressive yet.

Here is the addition of colour 2 over colour 3 adding darker shadows. This is the darkest your shadows will go. I don't touch colour 1 again.

This is after the addition of colour 2. I am continually zooming back out because if at any stage I feel that the folds are starting to go 'off' it means I can fix it before it's too late.

Here I used colour 5 to draw in the highlights. As you can see, unlike smudge shading this style is not so smooth and I have nicknamed it 'pixel shading with tools' as it leaves that kind of effect.

Lastly I added colour 6 in little places where the light was hitting the dress strongest mostly at the front of the dress to give it an feeling of roundness.

For the final doll I have added a top in black and some little details. Also I added hair and coloured her eyes blue.

And there you have it. How to make a long skirt. If you have any problems or want to ask any questions (or send me your dolls made by uting this tut) my email is satans_angel_pyro(at)hotmail(dot)com removing the (at) and adding a @ and replacing the (dot) with a .