Creating Light Motion Trails & Glowing Sparks

A technique often used in advertising these days, is these glowing lines. They look like light motion trails. If you ever wondered how to create these kind of lines, here is how I do it…

Light motion trails

Drawing a line

Draw a nice thin curved filled line in Photoshop using the Pen tool.

Add a glow

Double click the shape layer on the right to activate the Effects. Check the Outer Glow option and play with the color, transparency,... That's basically it. I think the hardest part is finding the exact setting and drawing the exact line you want.

Glowing sparks

Create the right brush

Create a brush using the following settings. Choose the default Soft Round 21 px brush. Go to the Brushes palette and edit the following settings:

• Change the spacing in the Brush Tip Shape to 222%
• Check Shape Dynamics and change the Size Jitter to 100%
• Check Scattering, check Both Axes and put the Scatter to 775%

Draw a random line using the brush

Choose a light color that will match perfect for the glowing sparkling dots. Draw a random line using the brush. That's it ;)

Trail of stars

As an extra we create a trail of stars. Launch Illustrator, create a new document and draw a group of random stars using the Star shape tool. You can use a circle as a guide (draw a circle and hit command/control + 5). Select all stars and drag them in the Symbols palette. Now select the Symbol Sprayer tool, choose the stars as symbol to spray with and draw the trail. You may need to experiment a bit with the Symbol Sprayer tool settings. Do this by double clicking the Symbol Sprayer tool in the Toolbox. If you got your trail, select all stars and go to Object > Expand. Select all stars, go to Photoshop and paste your stars as a Shape Layer. Fill them in the color you want, add some transparency or a gradient mask etc. Play around.

Illustrator Pen Tool Exercises

The pen tool

The problem with the pen tool is that is isn't easily explained, because you need to feel and see how it works. Also when you are using Illustrator's Pen tool as long as I do you tend to forget how difficult and confusing it can be for beginners. Making a screencast out of it isn't the best solution so I got inspired by a PDF document by the University of Massachusetts. In that document you see how it all works, from stroke and fills to anchor points and so on. On page 7 you see an exercise and that's were I got the idea from to create my own.

Pen tool practice

So I started creating my own practice .ai document. This document contains a few basic examples in how to create shapes like a star, circle, waves, whoosh, etc. using only the Pen tool. You'll also find the instructions on what you exactly need to do with the pen tool and where to do it. Once you have done these several times I hope you'll understand the Pen tool and its quirks a little better. To be honest if you want to become proficient in Illustrator you can't live without it. It can be used for many purposes like re-tracing a bad logo that you got from a client or creating your own art of virtually anything.

Photoshop's pen tool

When you become good at it you can use it in Photoshop too for example to remove a image from its background. You draw a path around it. However ,the pen tool doesn't work in exactly the same way. For example, you need to hold down the option/alt key for combining curves with straight lines instead of just clicking in the anchor point. Adobe should make the Pen behavior the same in all their apps, that would make things easier.

Water Spirit - Drawing Fire

First, we have to chose a photo for our future work. I've picked one from sxc.hu and You can download it from this url http://www.sxc.hu/photo/891765 (You have to register first - it's FREE and realy worth of it). When You open Your photo in Photoshop make first step: Image -> Adjustments -> Desaturate (Shift + Ctrl + U). That will be our base image (I'll resize it to 450x600 px for presentation - You may work with larger image if You want or just use this bellow if You don't want to register on sxc.hu).

Now we will add a Adjustment Layer called Levels. Hold Alt Key, and click on Adjustments Layer button on Layers Palette. Select Levels. Make Sure that Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask is sellected. Then just slide dark arrow a little right.

As You can see - image is a little darker now. Now we will draw some fire. Make New Layer, select soft brush of the size You will choise, and using dark orange colour (for example #993300) make a "dot". Next use a smaller size with lighter colour (like #ff9933) make another dot. Again, smaller size, lighter colour (for example #ffcc66), and last time, smaller size, lighter colour (#ffff66) and dot.

Now it's time for a little "magic". Use Smudge Tool (R). Pick small, soft size, and make "fire tongues". Just click somewhere inside our dot, click, hold and drag it up. After first move You will know what I'm meaning. Try untill You will be satisfied. Remember that You may change the Strenght parameter. You will use Alt + Ctrl + Z combination lot of times!

Now lets make this fire more realistic by adding some light on hands. Go to Quick Mask Mode (Q), select big, soft brush, and "draw" there, where You think that the light should appear.

Leave Quick Mask Mode (Q), You will see a sellection. We have to inverse it by Select -> Inverse (Shift + Ctrl + I). Select our Hands Layer, and holding the Alt key add another Adjustment Layer called Color Balance (Use Previous Layer... should be sellected)

Now select our Color Balance Adjustment Layer Mask, and using black soft brush "erase" some lights, and using white - add some lights until You will feel that it looks good.

Next thing will be smal sparks. We have to prepare brush for this operation.

With those settings draw some sparks over our fire (on New Layer). Lower the Opacity of this layer (in my case it is 64%). Use orange colour picked from our fireball (just improvise).

Change again to regular soft brush, use #ffffcc colour (or similar light yellow), select our fireball layer, and make a bright dot inside of it (just for better effect).

My final result:

Gauzy Text Effect

Now, firstly, you’ll have to create a new document in which you can make this text. For this tutorial I’m going to be using a size of 1000×500 pixels with the default resolution (DPI) of 72 and white background.

After creating your document, add in a suitable background using Gradient Overlay layer style:

Now we have something like this:

After that I would like to bring some picture to background to make the text effect more evident. Actually, you can use different pictures, but I prefer to use this one picture of robot Marvin. Bring it to the canvas and then reduce it a little bit as shown on a picture below:

I ended up with this for my background. If you want to download the picture of robot used above, please feel free: Robot.png
Use the Outer Glow layer style to make the picture more contrast.

Alright, time to write out your text. I’ll just be using the font called Helios Black (270 pt, Crisp) for this tutorial, which is commercial. If you don’t have it, just try different font. Write out something like ‘gauzy’ in the middle of canvas using Horizontal Type Tool.

Now set fill opacity to 0% up, after that apply Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Inner Glow, Bevel and Emboss, Contour, Satin, and Stroke layer styles to this text layer:

Also I would like to add some pattern to our gauzy text style. For this effect create a new document with size of 5×5 pixels and draw cross lines by using Pencil Tool as on picture below:

Then go to Edit > Define Pattern and save it as pattern. After that go back to our main document and apply the Pattern Overlay layer style to get the next picture:

Thanks for reading everyone! Hope it was really very interesting for you!