Tutorials are some of the most generous things designers can give to other designers (other than stock images) so I thought I should start thinking about what I could put into a tutorial. So I decided to combine some things I’ve learnt recently.

So today I’ll be showing you how to make a particle trail.

Illustrator

Above is what we’re working towards, just a simple spiral path and a special brush effect. Better start by opening Photoshop and Illustrator, now I did this in CS3 but I’m sure it won’t make too much difference what Creative Suite you’re using. 

Start of in Illustrator by drawing out an elipse (L). Get out the Direct Selection Tool and select the left point and delete it, leaving you with half a circle. My Stroke is set to weight 1 point.

Now make a copy of that and reflect it on the vertical axis using the contextual menu brought up by right clicking (command clicking on a Mac). Now to stop you from just remaking the elipse you halved in the first place take the original curve and stretch it vertically to make it taller than the other half. How tall you want this bit will define how tight the spiral is so choose now.

Lining up the two halves can be a pain but if you used copy and can Ctrl + f (Cmd + f) you will paste it into the same place, now start dragging it and then hold down shift to keep it in the same plane as the original. Then you just have to line it up in the X axis. You’ll probably find it useful to group these elements as you now have a complete ‘loop’.

Now simply copy and Ctrl + f paste some more groups and line them up. To finish up you’ll need to go into one of the groups by double clicking a loop and copy the taller half elipse to put on the end and make a convincing ending trail. As you can see the elipse and the beginning part’s height have combined together to make a tight spiral, this isn’t really what I need for the next bit so Blue Peter style here’s one I made earlier.

Photoshop

Right, now it’s time to crack open a new Photoshop document. I often just open an A4 document to fit all requirements as that’s plenty big enough for experimenting.

Now take the twirl path and copy and paste it into your Photoshop document, in the dialog box that comes up choose Pixels as although Smart Objects retain their vector resizing properties you can’t distort them like you can with a rasterized layer.

To give the spiral it’s wide base and narrow top I used the Edit > Transform > Perspective tool. Now you can simply drag one of the corner grips and reduce the top width. How much you do this is up to you but you’re not going to get it right with only one transform. Try using the Perspective tool and the free transform tool together to narrow the top and then reduce the height of the spiral. Make sure you don’t pixelate the line.

Now you should end up with something like this, unless of course you don’t want it to look that in which case it’s whatever you envisioned. It’s time to add some particle effects, you can do this with the Brush and some fancy settings.

Opening up the Brushes menu will present you with this panel, along the left side there are various setting to adjust how the brush works, we’ll be using Shape Dynamics, Scattering and Other Dynamics so tick those fields. By using a variation of Size Jitter, Scatter, Opacity Jitter and Flow Jitter you achieve the necessary effects.

Below you can see all the settings I used but the key ones are Size Jitter under Shape Dynamics, Scatter under Scattering and the Opacity and Flow Jitter under Other Dynamics. 

Click the below images if you want a bigger image to look at.

 

Okay so now we’ve finished setting up the brush choose the colour you want then you’re done with it for now. Time to set up the path the brush will be following.

To get a more varied and complex particle effect with smaller particles at the top leading to big particles at the bottom we’re going need to make the spiral wider. Right click on the layer and select ‘Blending Options…’, in this menu select Stroke and choose a weight of about 3 or 4 pixels. You may need to experiment with this later.

Now it’s time to make the path. First make a new layer and merge it with the swirl so the Stroke becomes selectable. Ctrl Click (Cmd Click) the preview of the swirl layer in Layers this will select the layer. Go to the Paths tab and click the ‘Make work path from selection’, this has been enlarged in the image above, it’s the fourth one from the left at the bottom.

This will create a work path that can be used for our particles. Go back to layers and create a new layer and then select the Pen tool, right click and select ‘Stroke Path…’ and in the resulting dialog box select Brush with the Simulate Pressure box checked. By Simulating Pressure Photoshop automatically make the particles get bigger and smaller.

And now you have your particles it’s just a matter of perfecting it and finishing it up. If at the top there are two separate trails try altering how much the particles Scatter or how big your brush is. If the swirl is too thin the larger particles will be at the top so make sure it’s thick enough. 

To finish up I added an Outer Glow to the particles using the Blending Options and added a colour gradient from #27825c to #70b370. These colours are from this Palette on COLOURlovers​.com.

Thanks

Well there you have it, particle trailers, a pleasant little effect that could perhaps be adapted to a bubble related logo or who knows what else. Thanks for reading, drop me a comment and tell me how I did on my first tutorial if you could.