Dirty Magic Tricks

OK.. I'm sorry if you expected some real magic here .. if you have some to spare I'm the first to want a tutorial from you! :) But for now - how about faking it?

First you need a picture of course. I skip that here and start out with a cute little elf pic I did for this tutorial. It should not have a white background or a very light one because its really hard to make something seem bright compared to white. So if you have a pencil drawing .. consider at least making the background a mid grey tone before you start.

I'll show you different effects .. maybe I'll add some more later on, too. You can use one of them, or better still combine them for whatever effect you want for your picture. some can be easily made with a mouse, others require you to draw somewhat. I suggest you do them on a seperate layer ... that way you can easily change them and use layer modes too.

1. Sparkles

First and most simple effect are airbrush sparkles. You do them the same way you would with a real airbrush. Grab the airbrush tool and set your foreground color to white .. opacity about 30% .. now do a lot of small white dots where you want the sparcles to be. Set the airbrush tool to a bigger soft edged tip (16-40px) now and add a soft glow to some of them .. try to center the glow on an exitsting point. Next you need a tooltip that isn't in the standard palette .. so you have to load the tooltips .. select "various" and you should have completely new tooltips available, 2 of them are different sized x shapes that have soft edges. Select one of them and spray a few of your bigger dots. Done.

..Colored Sparkles

You can of course do this in color too. For this it is best to start with the glow in the color you want to use.Then make x with a lighter, warmer color, then the dots in a color that is very bright - perhaps even white. you can also make a smaller soft dot in this color over the last one too .. and add some small dots in all of the colors you used too.

2. Simple Fire

This is also one of the easiest things to do!
Make a big softedged dot with the airbrush tool and a smaller dot in a more saturated, brighter color with in that one. Grab the smudge tool and smudge various parts of the dot in or out .. but in one direction and with a bit curved lines.Its a bit hard to describe but not hard to do. Make the lowest part of your flame a bit brighter .. either with the dodge tool ot by drawing a bit of white or even blue etc. in. Look at some real flames for reference.
(I did not this time and my flames look crappy but I think you got the idea.)

3. Reflected Light

A little more artistic .. (means it involves drawing) .. refelected light.
Get a nice bright color and a hard edged airbrush at a low opacity and paint every surface that is near and directly facing your magic light. Then select a smaller brush (1 to 5 px depending on your image size of course) and a lighter shade of the same color and draw a smaller line directly alon the outlines. stay within the darker light aereas. It's especially nice to have the light refected in your sorcerers eyes too. And don't forget hair , equipment and background if its near the magic light. One last note .. if you combine this with sparcles and so on .. think a bit about the direction of the light - its probably above the fingers instead of between them in this case!

4. Electricity

Draw a sloppy zigzag line and then a brighter, smaller one within it. (I think you got that idea by now:) ) add a few bright dots with a low opacity brush and use the smudge tool to work on some of the edges..

..then set the layer mode to color dodge. (looks a lot nicer now, right?)

5. Smoke

There are several ways to do smoke of course .. this is one of the easiest I think but its a bit harder to describe than the effects above. But I'll try my best.

Make a irregular selection with the lasso tool.

Set your colors to black and white (default)and select filters/render/clouds.
The selected area is filled with a cloud pattern in black and white.

Set the layer to negative multiply and change contrast and brigthness until you have a nice irregular smoke pattern.

Now cancel the selection and smudge the rough brims a bit with a large brush. The nice thing about layers is that you can still adjust the position and size and opacity of your effect .. especially useful with effects like this one where you don't have that much control over the outcome. You can color the smoke too of course but the main part should stay white.

I'll add more effects whenever they come to my mind .. you can of course send me things to include or request stuff (if I can find out how to do it)

Bye for now.
Adorna

The size shown is working resolution .. you should work bigger.. and I regret this myself. Perhaps I'll do a bigger res version - no promises though. If you have crits, comments and/or useful ideas mail me!