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Photoshop Tutorials

Chroma Wallpapers

By Rick, Color Charge

This tutorial explains how to create a energetic, vibrant, colorful wallpaper, like the ones available at

Color Charge . These lines, which we’ll call Chroma were highly inspired by the iPod Nano Ad from

2006 and some Quantum Chromodynamics nerdery stuff. You will learn how to bend blurry shapes

with Warp tool to draw the lines, beams, and steams. Then you’ll know how to add some

and vibrating color effects, and finally polish your drawing. Aside reading this tutorial, you

Photoshop CS2 or CS3, and preferably a computer with a lot of memory and a larger screen to

achieve that effect.

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Photoshop file

Initial setup

FEB

Start with a very, very large screen: 3000 px x 2000 px wide. Draw a rectangle as background for the whole area

and fill it with a dark linear gradient layer style. Align that gradient with 45 degrees vertically (sometimes you may

change that angle to 90 or 60 degrees). Since the beginning, pay special attention to colors: black and dark violet

as base color. The waves colors will match a triad complementary balance with the base color, in our case, the

violet-cyan-orange axis.

Warp Tool

Draw lines! Many parallel lines (horizontal or vertical, or both!). Group them, duplicate, rasterize, group, duplicate,

rasterize… and finally add some blur. In this example I used white as base-color for the line themselves (white is

the easiest color to balance and add glowing and other layer styles):

After you reach a wide and tall group of lines, is time for some magic: randomly distort the shape with

Transform Tool ( Photoshop > Edit > Transform > Warp ):

One thing you’ll probably notice is the amount of confusing structural lines crossing over the shape; your first

attempts are going to be almost trial-and-error, later you’ll get used to this really amazing tool and will

shapes of Chroma. Don’t worry trying to find the perfect shape so early, things will fit better together when you have

more than 5 separate shapes matching a pattern or a familiar shape.

When complete, remember to press the Enter key, or click on the Apply Warp button, on the top. If your computer

survives the intense rendering and image post-processing… your artwork should be something like this:

Remember to use the Erase Tool to remove sharpen edges and give the wave a surreal looking. Explore other

combinations of shapes, lines, and textures - they’ll enhance your drawings.

If you did a small shape I don’t recommend you size it up or even warping again. The Warp tool isn

because you’ll be playing with rasterized shapes - not smart objects or vector shapes. If you insist warping the

same shape again, your shape is going to get some unwanted sharpen or sometimes blurry edges (depending on

your case). To avoid that, I recommend you the opposite way: start with a very large area and a large shape,

size it down. Better results, easier to distort.

Glow, screen, multiply, and other layer styles