#cool tutorials

Welcome to the very first ever tutorial here on spdy4′s Art Methods. I’m @spdy4 and today I’m going to share a cute little tutorial I did the other day.

So have you ever looked at a crack in the ground and thought.

“That would make a really cool lightning brush!” Well today I am going to show you how to do that!.

STEP 1: Take a picture!

Find any old crack in the ground, in the sidewalk, street, ground, wall, Any crack will work!, For tutorial purposes I’ll use this Crack I found, outside of a WalMart.

STEP 2 - 4: Adjust like crazy!!!

(Step 2) First you want to take your photo and make it black in white! (I’m using my iPhone to do most of the work.) 

(Step 3) use the following B&W settings shown. The after you do that we move into. 

(Step 4) Adjust your lighting and use the following settings shown in Step 4.

STEP 5 - 7: Transfer & clean up!

(Step 5) This step is to just admire your work so far.

(Step 6) This step however is where we transfer the photo you took & adjusted, and sending it to your computer. (I uploaded the photo to DropBox on my phone, then I logged into a computer, grabbed it, and cleaned up the black specks in Photoshop. This way only your black crack/lightning bolt will be the only thing on screen.

(Step 7) Creating your Brush! Select everything using Ctrl A. Then Use your Magic Wand Tool and deselect the white areas using Ctrl and Left Click on your mouse. Then when Only the Crack/Lightning is selected. Go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, name your Brush Lightning 1, click OK and Tada! You got yourself a Lightning Brush!

Step 8: Pizazz~*

So now we have a Lightning brush, but how can we make it even better? SPECIAL EFFECTS! On Photoshop, go to Filter > Layer Style > Outer Glow, use the Following settings above and tada!

You just turned, a Crack in the ground, into a Lightning Bolt! I hope you like this tutorial and if you want more tutorials, please reblog and like this post. If you use this tutorial, show me what you got, I’d love to see your work! Also I realized this Tutorial is mainly focused on Photoshop users. I’m sorry I don’t have other Art Programs. But if you can somehow adapt this to your program of choice. More power to you!