The ever-so funky Holly Stanway was the lucky winner of a 24-piece Letraset Tria Visualization kit with a bleedproof marker pad.

Holly is an Illustrator & artist working with everything from pens & paints to fabric & textiles. If you’re looking for an interesting read, or want some instructables on making somethings yourself, check out Holly’s blog alittlestranger.com.

Step 1

Open a new Photoshop document and set the background colour to black. We used a 1000px X 1000px document.
Create a new layer and from the brushes panel select a soft round brush – we used the 45 pixel brush (see below).

Step 2

In the brush editor, select ‘shape dynamics’ and set ‘size jitter’ to 100%. Next, select ‘Scattering’ and set scatter to 1000% and check the box for ‘Both Axes’. Set ‘count jitter’ to 86% and check the boxes for ‘wet edges’ and ‘smoothing’ on the left.

Step 3

Draw a line or curve on the new layer you created in Step 1. You should get an effect like the one below:

Step 4

Double click on the layer to bring up the effects palette. Select ‘Gradient Overlay’ and in the gradient dropdown, select your desired gradient.

Result

You should be left with a particle or bokeh effect which you can use a background. Try tweaking the opacity, applying a Gaussian blur or increasing the brush size to achieve different effects!

Blood Splatter Tutorial

Time: 20 mins
Skill Level: beginners to advanced
Equipment Required: Mac/PC, Photoshop (CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4), Wacom Graphics Tablet (optional)

Step 1
Create a new document in Photoshop – I created a 500 x 500 pixel document.

Step 2
Next, create a new layer and fill the layer with black.

Step 3
Go to the brush selector and choose the ‘soft round 65′ brush (hover the cursor over the brush picture to see the name).

Open the brush panel (F5 key or go to Windows > Brushes) and select the ‘shape dynamics’. Set ‘size jitter’ and ‘angle jitter’ to 100%. Select ‘scattering’ and set ‘scatter’ to 100% and select the ‘both axes’ option. Select ‘other dynamics’ and set the ‘opacity jitter’ to 100%. Finally select the ‘wet edges’ and ‘smoothing’ options.

Step 4
With our customized (customised for us Brits!) brush selected, choose a dark red/maroon colour and brush over the page and you should get the following effect:

 

 

Step 5
Repeat step 4 with a variety of light and darker colours which should leave you with an image like the following:

 

Step 6
Select the magic wand tool from the toolbar and set the tolerance to 60. Select the black area and delete it. Your image should now look similar to the one below:

 

 

Step 7
We now have the basis for our blood splatter but it needs a bit of adjusting to look more realistic. Go to the layer style panel by double clicking on the layer we have been working with. select bevel and emboss  and check both the contour and texture options. Under the texture option, select the cloud texture and set scale  to 81% and depth to +79%. Under the main bevel and emboss settings, use the following settings:

 

Double-click the contour icon and use the following settings:

Use the above input and output percentages for the first point and for the second point use the following percentages:

 

Step 8
The final effect should be the same as below. By adjusting the scatter settings of the brush, it can also be used for freehand drawing.

 

 

I hope this tutorial is useful and am happy to answer any questions people may have. More tutorials will be coming soon!