To begin, open a new file, 16 million colors, with a background color
of a medium shade. Here I've chosen basic blue.
Pick a lighter shade of the same color, or a lighter color that goes
well with your background and use the airbrush to spray some on. Make sure
your airbrush is set to a nice large size - about 20 pixels or so.
Now here's the easiest part. Select the Retouching tool (the little
finger) and set it to Smudge. Set the Paper Texture to None, the Shape
to Round, the size to 60 or 80, the Hardness to about 60, the Opacity to
75, the Density to 100, and Steps to 1. These are about the settings that
I use, but they are by no means carved in stone. Other settings may also
give good results. The only real requirement is that your size be set LARGE.
Now just click on your image and make sweeping diagonal motions. Your colors
will swirl and blend together
Continue to sweep back and forth, starting from the upper left corner,
with your diagonla sweeps move down to cover the entire image. The best
effects are obtained when the smudge brush strays out of the window at
the end of each sweep. This avoids leaving artifacts of a smudge where
the brush stopped travelling
Depending on how much you smudge, you can get very dramatic changes
in color over small areas, or your pattern can be more subtle and nearly
homogeneous. The nice thing is that the results are subtly different every
time.
After you've made your pattern, you can get some wonderful new ones
by duplicating the file and then adjusting the hue, saturation, and lightness.
I won't lie to you, some of the patterns you'll get this way could make
your eyes bleed, but many are very pleasant, such as the orange pattern
below.
mixing three or more colors can also give pleasant results. For the
purple pattern below I started with a white background and then sprayed
on dark and light purple before smudging.
A wide range of color combinations are possible. The only reall problem
with these is that they don't always tile very well when made seamless
with the Selections: Convert to Seamless Pattern command. If you have the
DCSpecial filters PatternEdit Do and PatternEdit Undo (available at GrafoManiac),
you can do a litle tweaking at the seams. Because these patterns are so
easy to make, I usually just start with a very large file when I make them,
that way the pattern doesn't have to tile when I do a fill.
So, what do you do with these patterns after you create them? Well, stained glass is one possibility, or perhaps a sort of Cloisonne effect like the one below.
Email me at State_of_Entropy@hotmail.com