Here’s a neat effect that I happened upon by accident. It’s a really simple Photoshop trick that results in a cool little watercolory smudge. Now you may be thinking, “You fool! Why bother with this? What could you even use this for?” The answer, my friend, is anything your heart desires. They make great ambient backgrounds, nice accents, and are just a fun thing to throw into your composition when you need a bit of subtle color.

Step 1:

The first step is creating a new layer with a transparent background and dragging a small radial gradient onto it. Make sure you don’t bring the gradient to the edge of your canvas, as you’ll have to stretch it in the next step.

Step 2:

Stretch your gradient out a little and set the layer opacity to around 50%.

Step 3:

Now we’re going to use something REALLY helpful, an Adjustment Layer. These things are great because they let you change things like color, contrast, and saturation non-destructively, that is, without changing the original pixels.

We’re going to create a Hue/Saturation layer. To do this either click on the black and white circle at the bottom of the layers panel and click Hue Saturation… or go to Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue Saturation…

When the Hue/Saturation properties panel pops up play around with the hue however you like, that will change the color of your smudge. It is very important that you set the saturation to +100. Leave the lightness alone for now.

Step 4:

Let’s create a new layer. Set your foreground color to black, grab a big soft brush, and paint around your shape till you get some neat colors around the edge. Don’t go to far over the edge of your gradient or you’ll get a lot of weird gray area, unless that’s what you’re looking for. This step is where CTRL-Z (undo) is a good friend.

Step 5:

Now set the opacity of the black layer you just painted to around 15% and you’ve got yourself a nice paint smudge. The great thing about this is that since you used that Hue/Saturation layer, you can easily change the color of your blob by double clicking on that layer and adjusting the Hue.

GodBless:VQ