The Oxygen Orb

We're fans of Sci-Fi here at Graphisutra, so we thought we'd make a tutorial about a Sci-Fi-like oxygen orb in Photoshop. Since this is going to be a lengthy a lot of the basic steps have been omitted, so if you're new to Photoshop, you might want to checkout our other tutorials first.
This will be a bit lengthy, so we might as well start right away. Create a new document in Photoshop, 360x580px. Paint the background dark grey, or play around with a few different patterns, here's what we used:

Now, we're going to need to create the main "overlay" shape, which is going to be a holder for the whole orb. You can create this shape by combining the rectangle tool, and a
rounded rectangle with 35px of border radius. The color used is #dedede. Here's what you should get:

Pretty basic so far, so we're going to play around with the layer blending options (style) a bit. Follow along:




The gradient here should be:

Of course, if you want an aluminium look, or something lighter, the settings are easy to change :) If you're taking the tutorial route, you should be seeing this in your Photoshop document.

Time for the main orb... Excited? We're starting with a plain boring circle, though don't let your hopes down. The circle is 215x215px.