Abstract Brushing Techniques: Particle Zoom

This Photoshop tutorial will teach you how to make the trendy Particle effects in photoshop as seen in many abstract pieces today. This is one of the easy abstract brushing techniques!

1. Create a new document for your abstract particle brushing in Photoshop.  For demonstration purposes, I will keep my document small at 300x400.  Fill in your background layer with black:

2. In this step, we will be setting up a custom brush to create our "particles" with.  In the top right of Photoshop, you should see a tab labeled brushes as displayed below:

Click on the Brushes tab to bring down a list of options.  These are all setting that will effect your brush.  Before you can edit anything, please make sure that you have selected the brush tool from your tool bar (the paintbrush Icon, or press B).  Once selected, set up your brush as follows:

Set your Size Jitter up to the maximum so that your brush will vary in size giving your brushing more depth.

Scatter out your brush to give it more of a random feel to it and make it seem more like particles

Set up your spacing so that your brushing does not seem to cluttered into one area!

3. Select white as your foreground color.  The hard part is now done!  Create a new layer on your document, and make a few simple strokes with your new brush:

4. As you can see, our brush settings have varied the way our stroke looks.  We now have the basis for our particle brushing.  The final steps of this tutorial will teach you how to give your particles motion, and color.  First, duplicate this layer by right clicking the layer your in, and clicking Duplicate Layer.  In your new layer, go to Filter > Blur > Radial Blur.  In the settings dialogue box, type in the following:

Amount - 30
Blur Method - Zoom
Quality - Good (not required, but faster than best)

5. Click ok, and you will see that there is a little motion in your particles now:

6. Duplicate this layer 3-6 times until you get results like shown below:

7. Now its time to add the color.  To add color to abstract brushing, many graphic designers choose to use color balance layers.  Create a new color balance layer by going to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance:

8. Enter the following settings (Make sure that your in Highlights for tone balance)

+25, 0, -100

9. Click ok:

10. And there you have it!  Particle Abstract Brushing in 9 easy steps.  Of course, there are endless variations for this kind of brushing technique!

Good Luck!