Here, I'll show you how to make a bit of a misty brushworking effect. Anybody can do this, I'll write it with a bit of detail.

1. Start with a render, either stock or your own. Make sure it has alpha layering. If you don't know what that is, see my follow up tutorial. I'll be using this, with a black layer behind the alpha layer.






2. Now. We'll start with a colour. It doesn't have to be the final colour, just something to work with for now. Colour balance the layer. (If you don't know how to do that, go Here for my colour balance tutorial.






3. We'll then go into some basic base brushwork, to get a foothold on it. Grab a big fuzzy brush, about 200. Flow/opacity at 100. Put a layer behind the main render. Just go around the outer edges of the render now, to get a back glowy thing.






4. Now, we're going to bust out some more detail. Drop the brush down to about 100 or so, and the opacity to 50. Make a new layer above the render now. Lightly brush around the edges, to prepare for the brushwork. Put more emphasis around the chunky areas that stick out, if there are any.






5. Time for a little fun. Get out the smudge tool, and change it to something with a lot of sharp, jagged edges. Something like this will do fine, and I do believe it comes with photoshop. Change your settings to match mine, the stronger the strength the more smudged it's going to be. Expect this to be tedious: There will be much smudging and swore wrists for beginners






6. Smudge outwards, violenty. Don't have a definitive direction, try to random it a bit, but still point it to the outside. You will probably need to add a bit more brushwork than I did in the previous step to it, more on the outside. Make sure it's still faint though, so it isn't completely opac.






7. Brush, erase, smudge, brush. Don't be afraid to take a giant fuzzy eraser and blotch out some of the brushwork, and then brush more over the erased parts. It's a tedious process, but if you just keep messing with it, something will pop up. Experiment, with brushwork textures, erasing textures, and more. Feel free to multilayer your brushwork, if you are happy with one layer but still thinks it needs more. Different wrist strokes offer different cloud motions. This is abstract, remember. We are working on clouds, here, so try and swirl it a bit, but still keep your focus on moving it outwards. Also, try not to make it look like it was smudged with a spikey. Again, I state that this is tedious. You're not going to make one stroke and have it done. You'll probably end up brushing the same place 3 or 4 times in a row, just to get the desired effect.

Tip: Smudge repeatedly on the very edge of the brush to make it fade nicely.
I dropped the opacity of my final layer to 65, so that the later steps are more visible.


(bad quality for large images sake)




8. That's my first layer. I'm now going to make another layer on top of that, to do a bit more detailed brushwork. Meaning, cranking down the strength/size of my smudgebrush. I'm going to add a bit of texture to my brush, as well. Go to the brushes tab in the top right corner, and click texture. Config settings for something jagged.




Brush from the outside in. Almost always.





Bit different, eh? What I did: I erased much of the inner brushings. I changed the backround to a medium-greyish colour, but it was tinted by the colour balance layer.
I also added a couple back layers of dark grey brushwork, to give a larger feel for the frontal work. More brushing, smudging, erasing.






Added a few more layers. This is all the brushwork I am going to do, because I don't feel like spending the 5 hours on it that is uneeded. DONT YOU GO THINKING THE SAME! THE MORE TIME YOU SPEND ON IT THE BETTER THE OUTCOME WILL BE! Don't slack off and do it in an hour, give a lot of thought into it.
Note how mine seems very blotched from the center outwards. Don't do that. Definately don't do that, I didn't plan for mine to come out looking like it did. Make it look like it really doesn't have a center of direction, although make sure there is still one you are going to, the outer circle.

9. Time for some finishing touches on the picture.
Soft light, a tag, and a bit of a crop to get rid of the excess that I didn' t brush.
This is what I get with an hours work:






This is what you get with 10 hours of work:
http://www.deviantart.com/view/9832181/

There is a large difference in it, isn't there?
That's right, spend lots of time. Don't fear being picky about it. The more you experiment, the longer you put into it, the better you will get out of the investment. Enjoy

(C) Tweak Productions, VDC
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