Tutorial: Simple background part 2

Tutorial!

In this post I’m going to show you how to make this slick background. Let’s say it’s the second part of the background tutorials.

Let’s get to work!

Open a Photoshop document sized 1800*1600.

Download (or make) a regular hexagon. I got one here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Regular_hexagon.svg/400px-Regular_hexagon.svg.png

Open it in Photoshop and put it on your 1800*1600 document.

Now you have to select it, but because it’s transparent you will have to select the inside by yourself. So, take your Magic Wand and click on the hexagon. While its selected, take the Polygonal Lasso Tool, hold Shift and select the inside like this. (don’t mind the layers on the left J)

Now set the foreground to black and press Alt+Enter. It will fill up your selection.

Positioning time! Make up a shape using the hexagons. You can duplicate them by pressing Ctrl+J.

I played around a bit and got this:

Now copy a hexagon using Ctrl+J and merge the rest that make the shape. You can color it if you want, it doesn’t really matter.

We’ll be deleting some of the hexagons, so take your forever alone hexagon, press Ctrl+T and decrease its size a bit. Protip: Hold Shift while resizing.

Now select the hexagon (Ctrl+click on the layer thumbnail), select the layer with the shapes and press delete. Hide the hexagon to see the result.

Now do the same with the other hexagons you’ve got. You can leave some filled as well, whatever you want. After a while I got this:

With the selected shapes layer go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur set the radius to 1px and press OK.

Now for the background. Create a new layer, take the Gradient tool and select two colors.

Select the Reflected Gradient in the upper left corner. Now make a line like this:

Now go to Filter> Sketch> Water paper. Set the values like this:

Select the shapes layer and press Ctrl+J. Put the newly created layer under the shapes layer set the blend mode to Multiply and opacity to 66%. Make it look like a shadow, so move it out a bit. Go to Filter> Blur> Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 4.5. You should get something like this.

Download this brush and import it in your Photoshop. http://www.brushking.eu/329/spiral-brush-set.html

Create a new layer, take a brush and make a line like this. 

Set the blend mode to Soft Light, opacity to 66% and erase the edges a bit. 

You can add more lines if you like.

Now create a new layer on top and apply the image (Image>Apply Image) and set the blend mode to Overlay. Lower the opacity, set it at 22%.

That’s it. You can use that for your desktop background, other pictures and stuff like that.

Post your outcomes in the comments!