Create a Portal

Introduction

Ever since the brilliant game Portal by VALVE, I've been dying to make a tutorial about it. It has been sitting in my stuff-to-do-folder for quite a while now and with the upcoming release of Portal 2, I think we do need what is currently lacking on the interwebz; a good Portal-tutorial! This tutorial will show you how to draw your own portal from scratch and will give you a method of spicing up your Portal-cosplay photos!

The shape

The shape of a Portal isn't exactly perfectly oval due to it being a constantly animating essence of energy. Since this is Photoshop and thus static, we cannot animate it, but by giving the shape a little dynamic, we'll make it look like it could be animated. To achieve the initial shape, just grab an Elliptical Marquee-Tool and draw a long oval egg-shape and fill it with any color on a new layer.

To make it a little more dynamic, go to Filter>Distort>Wave and put it on the almost lowest settings. We want a VERY soft wave-distortion in it. Not too much.

Coloring the Portal

After that, add these blending-modes to it.

Your result will look something like this.

Finishing up the glow

With an orange color, use the Brush-tool to brush small strokes along the yellow rim of the shape. Don't forget to do this on a new layer and make the orange a little darker than the yellow rim.

Go to Filter>Blur>Radial Blur and keep it on the standard settings. They should be on 10, Spin, Good. You don't need to set the quality to Best. You can even set it to Draft if you like a little noisy grain in your blur.

Press CTRL+J to duplicate the layer, and press CTRL+T to open the transform-window. A bounding-box will appear around your layer with anchor-points in every corner. While holding ALT and SHIFT, click one of the corners and while holding the mouse-button down, drag it a bit away from the center. You will notice that the shape is enlarged. Press ESC to undo your transformation if you screwed up or ENTER to complete the transformation. Press CTRL+U to change the colors. Increase the saturation a little and decrease the lightness a little to make your orange a bit darker.

Repeat the previous step where you open a new layer, draw lines around the shape and blur them, but this time, instead of blurring, go to Filter>Distort>Twirl and twirl the lines. Play around with the settings to make sure you achieve the blurred lines that you like.

Then you can continue with adding anything inside the portal you like by placing an image above the Portal-layer and pressing CTRL+SHIFT+G to group it. Below you can see a closed Portal and a random photo added to the shape. The closed portal was made with the Chrome-filter on a photo with a nice gradient over it :)

Conclusion

And there you have it! I intentionally left the method of creating the closed portal a little vague, so you can try to recreate it. I've given you the exact way of how I did it except for the little details. Post a picture in the comments if you got an awesome portal-picture. The tutorial can be done also in blue if you desire (looking at the last image). The way of doing so is just changing the colors here and there. I have no idea for the colors of the portals in the multiplayer, but you can literally choose any color of portal you like. However, the orange and blue ones are the classic colors. Kudos to Valve for a great game! Thanks for reading... hope you liked it!