Build textures like these in creating abstract art with Photoshop.
Nonobjective, nonrepresentational or abstract art steps away from depicting recognizable natural forms. Its subject matter draws from shape and line to express ideas, sometimes using geometric shapes, sometimes rendering representational objects down to essential forms. Adobe Photoshop can help you create nondecorative artwork by providing tools that are one or more steps removed from the natural world of studio brushes, pens, pencils, pastels and paint. Whether you want to explore line and shape, paint in an expressive "action" style or delve into the interaction of color with color, Adobe Photoshop facilitates your vision.
Instructions
1. Create a new Adobe Photoshop document large enough for your style of painting. You may want a larger digital canvas if you plan to use action methods than if your style focuses on small refinements of line and shape.
2. Use Photoshop's Pen tool to create Shape layers that feature geometric forms.Along with modes that draw rectangles, rounded rectangles, ellipses and circles, polygons and lines, the Pen tool offers limitless bezier drawing capabilities. Click and drag to draw freeform geometry using curves and straight lines.
3. Activate Photoshop's selection tools, then use their output as the basis for filled areas created with the Paint Bucket tool. You can create rectangular and elliptical selections, including row- and column-based areas that are one pixel tall or wide. Intersect your selections, add or subtract them to or from one another, and build discontiguous selections in various parts of your document area. The Paint Bucket tool emulates action techniques as well as flat airbrushed fills.
4. Use gradients and gradient-fill layers to add color transitions with airbrushed appearances, strong color juxtapositions and geometric forms, including circular, angular and linear styles. Deconstruct gradients by spreading small color ranges across large document distances to reveal banded stepping between shades and use it as a technical element of your work.
5. Use adjustment layers as creative tools. Push a Levels or Curves adjustment to distort color and reveal detail in brush strokes or gradient fills. Use Invert, Threshold and Posterize adjustments to experiment with negative color, tonal reduction and flat planes of pigment. Extract new capabilities from them by combining adjustment layers or setting them to layer blending modes other than "Normal."
6. Set alternate layer blending modes on pixel and shape layers to create new forms by transforming the appearance of layer elements that lie on top of or beneath one another. Whether you choose a blending mode that darkens, lightens, mixes or inverts color, you enable techniques that transcend natural painting and offer new ways of looking at your work.
7. Use Photoshop's filters to alter the textures of your work or to create new textures. Experiment with a layer filled with solid color by adding noise and distorting the result into new tonalities. Set up Photoshop actions that combine random filter sequences, then apply them to layers with textured tone to obtain interesting, surprising results.
