Tutorials: How to design liquid digital lava?

Start off with a new document that gives you plenty of room to work with. Because we’re working originally from within Photoshop you can choose whatever resolution and image size you want without having to worry about losing image quality when importing bitmap images; you can choose your size and get great print quality with these kinds of tutorials.

Grab your ‘G’radient tool and choose any color gradient. Your results will almost never be exactly the same as any other time or anyone else’s use of this tutorial or technique.

Here I’m using the dark gold gradient created in another tutorial. Go ahead and put the gradient blending mode on difference and just crazy with it (on the background layer). Make purposeful intersections or whatever you want while on the reflected gradient tool.

I’ve also added a few radial gradient swipes. Keeps looking freakier and freakier doesn’t it? That’s ok. When you think you’re done, go to the Image: Adjustments: Desaturate. This draws all of the color out of your gradients.

If you end up with gradient background that is too dark, go ahead and duplicate the layer by dragging it to the new layer icon and change the blending mode to one of the light set. I’m using linear dodge in this case which brings out the light values of the two layers naturally.

Go to Filter: Sketch: Chrome and choose some settings (which will look mostly the same across the board).

Now you’ve got a silky chrome field of digital warm goo. Remember that you can use this technique a dozen different times and get completely different results!

Create another blank layer and just use the radial gradient tool on difference. I’ve chosen the default goldbar gradient (bright yellow).

Kind of reminds me of cotton candy and sugar. Anyways keep doing several different radial swipes and maybe a few diamond ones (or all diamond).

Now go ahead and Desaturate again under Image: Adjustments. You can also press Shift Ctrl U (Shift Cmd U). This takes out our cotton candy coloring (essentially it doesn’t matter what color gradient you’re going to pick if you’re going to desaturate it but you can enjoy the thoughts of cotton candy for a minute).

Now bring up a color fill layer either by creating a new layer and filling it with your color or from the pop up menu at the very top Solid Color as fill and then choose your color (here a red).

Create some appropriate text with white as the foreground color. Here I’m using my centering technique...link the text layer to the background layer; select the background layer in the layers palette, click on the moVe tool and then choose ‘align horizontal centers’ as shown. You can then unlink the layers. This will center the text (or other layers) off of perfect center.

Bring back the work that we did earlier in the tutorial and put it into a layer set. Now you can try out some different blending modes. In Photoshop, it’s all about ‘options’ (like in dating??). Color burn creates a really nice rich artsy effect. It’s up to you to develop your eye to determine what you think works best. This exact tutorial has never been done before and when start creating your own version it will also have never been done before. This bed of liquid roses looks kind of gothic. Those almost looks like skulls in there..hmm...

Here’s a different effect which could look like different things to many people. A crowd of people sleeping at a eurail depot?

Ooh...Linear Light..very interesting. You’ll want to run through all of your blending modes (even I do it all the time) because each situation is different on how the light of two layers will ‘play’ with each other. We’ve got a mixture of different angles and directions but it makes it all the more complicated and intriguing...I should sell it at Sotheby’s from a hi-res print...

Here is the document without the original layer set turned on (which I didn’t show earlier).

To add an inner stroke to make a ‘border/frame’ if your background layer is locked. First have ‘Thing’ drag it to the new layer icon and then drag the locked layer to the oscar the grouch bin

and then you can add a Stroke it to the west effect.

Here I’m grabbing the background layer from another tutorial .psd and Ctrl clicking to select it and then Ctrl C to copy it to memory. File: New and then Ctrl V to paste it onto a new document.