Abstract Brushing Techniques: Contrail Lines

This Photoshop tutorial will teach you an excellent technique for creating neat abstract contrail lines for your digital art works.

1. Create a new document and fill it with a black background.  I am going to make mine 300x400 for viewing purposes in this tutorial, but you may want to make yours larger:

2. Select White as your primary color.  Now, select your brush tool, and set up a simple brush with the following settings in Photoshop:

3. Create a new layer in your Photoshop document, and while holding shift, draw a line down the center of your image:

4. Now we need to distort our line using one of Photoshop's Distort Filters.  Go to Filter > Distort > Shear.  Set up the options for the shear as follows:

5. Click ok:

6. As you can see, this has distorted our line into a neat bending line.  Touch up the ends of the line with a small soft eraser tool by making the ends sharper.  Just try to erase one side of the line, and gradually move inwards.  Zooming in may help:

7. Now, duplicate this layer, and go to Edit > Transform > Flip Horizontal:

8. Place both of these layers into a layer set (Folder Icon in Layers Palette > Drag both of the line layers into the folder), and duplicate the layer set.  Now Click Ctrl + T (Transform), and while holding shift, make it smaller in size.

9. Now, create a new Color Balance Layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance), and fill in the following settings under Highlights Tone Balance:

10. Your effect is basically done!  Now you just need to apply it to one for your artworks, or digital renders from a 3d application such as cinema 4d.  One effect I like to create with these looks like a combination of Particle effects and Contrails.  You can see an example below:

Good Luck!