Design Tutorial 4 – Aurora Borealis

Posted by ScotSpellman on Nov 1, 2011 in Diving Into Design | 0 comments

For my fourth design tutorial, I wanted to work on some fun gradient effects while getting used to more of the tools that Photoshop has to offer. I stumbled across this really cool tutorial showing how to make an Aurora Borealis light show, similar to one you would see in Alaska. I couldn’t resist .

First, I wanted to find a nice mountain scape to trace for the silhouette. I tried to find one from my personal photography stash, but no luck. After looking a bunch of mountain scapes, I finally found one that I liked and looked like he would fit the bill quite nicely (which he did). Google images ftw! Here is the photo I decided to use as the base for my silhouette:

After bringing the image into Photoshop, onto tracing the mountain horizon using the pen tool. I can’t emphasize enough how power this pen tool is, still blows me away. It’s pretty tricky at first, but after my experience creating the Plantilicious logo, the pen tool starting to become more natural to use. Took a while to trace it out, then I grabbed the stars asset from the tutorial and put all the stars in the background.

After my base mountain and stars were there, no for the fun stuff, the light show. To accomplish this, I started with a think paint brush and then gave it a Gaussian Blur with some motion blur in there. I used similar steps to create all of the different light layers. The tutorial also showed how to make custom paint brushes, that are used to make the vertical lines in the gradients, giving them a really cool looking effect.

Then there were clouds. Another part I really enjoyed in this tutorial is how to make the clouds in Photoshop. I can’t believe how easy it was, Photoshop already has a clouds render-er built into it. Time to hit my staples “That was easy.” button, lol. After the clouds, it was just organizing the layers and wha-la, I have my Aurora Borealis light show.

Overall, this was a really fun tutorial. It exposed me to more of the pen tool along with effects like Gaussian and Motion blurs and got to play with some built in rendering methods like the clouds. I would recommend this tutorial to anyone that wants to expand their Photoshop skills.

Here is the finished product:

Download Scot’s AI source file: AuroraBorealis.psd

View the tutorial here: http://abduzeedo.com/create-aurora-borealis-wallpaper-photoshop