Creating Flame Swirls in Photoshop
By Dr Diablo | Photoshop CS3 | BeginnerIn this tutorial you are going to learn how to create the rich flaming swirls you see below through following easy steps using Motion Blur and Shear Distort Filter as well as some Crosshatch brushing. The swirls are colored using the Indexed Black Body color table to give you a similar final result as the one below.
We are going to start off by creating the swirls in black and white and then we will color them using the Color Table.
Creating the Swirls
Start off by creating a new 640x480 document in Photoshop. The Background Contents do not really matter since we are going to fill the background with the color black.
Hit the D key on your keyboard to reset your Color Boxes to its default white and black and then hit the X key to invert the colors locations. Now your Foreground Color should be set to #FFFFFF White and Background Color is set to #000000 Black. Press Ctrl + Backspace to fill the canvas with black. Create a New Layer by going through Layer>New>Layer. Grab the Brush Tool from the Tool Panel on the left to get started with drawing our flame swirls. Right click anywhere on the canvas to open up the Brush Options panel. Click on the arrow that is on the top right corner of the panel and select Assorted Brushes, and then click on the 48px Crosshatch brush type as shown in the screenshot below.
Draw a couple of strokes using the Crosshatch 4 brush you just selected as shown below on a New Layer. Make sure that your strokes are a little bit far away from the edges of the canvas.
We are going to apply a Motion Blur to these strokes. Go through Filter>Blur>Motion Blur, give it an Angle of 45 degrees and a Distance of 150 px.
Our set of lines is now complete, it's time to swirl them. Go through Filters>Distort>Shear and apply the following area coordinates.
The swirls should now look like the image below.
Our swirls are almost ready, before proceeding onto coloring them, we are going to make the flames look more rich in color and more vivid, this is done by duplicating the swirls layer twice to have a result of three layers. You can do that by going to Layer>Duplicate Layer. Perform the duplication process twice only. You should now end up with something similar to the image below:
Flaming Up The Swirls
We are done with the process of creating the swirled shapes and now it is time color them up. This is the same technique we used in our other Blazing Flame tutorial. Go through Image>Mode>Grayscale and proceed when asked to flatten image and discard color information. Now go through Image>Mode>Indexed Color. When that is done, go through Image>Mode>Color Table and choose Black Body from the Table drop down menu.
By applying the Black Body color table your final flaming swirls should look similar to the image shown below.
This concludes our tutorial, you can always experiment with this technique by applying your own touch of style to it. Make sure you show off your work in the Graphics Showcase forum. I hope that you've learnt something new from it, feel free to email me on diablo@oman3d.com for any comments or questions or alternatively post in the Oman3D Forum to get instant feedback.
- End of Tutorial.