Turn photos into artworks
Make mesmerizing mandala patterns
Photoshop’s Brush tool is full of hidden delights, and in this project we’ll explore one of our favourites to create an eye-catching effect. Simple yet ingenious, the Symmetry Painting feature lets you paint in several places at once. There are several types of symmetrical painting options to experiment with, but the most enjoyable is Mandala. Often found in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism, mandalas are geometric patterns organized around a single central point (in fact, ‘mandala’ is Sanskrit for ‘circle’). The Mandala Brush setting in Photoshop lets you create these sorts of designs in seconds. You can also choose how many segments for your mandala design, which basically determines how many places you can paint at once. It’s simple to set up, wonderfully creative, and it’s easy to lose yourself for a couple of hours blissfully painting circular mandala patterns.
Of course, we don’t need to stop at painting, we can also call upon other tools in the Photoshop arsenal to take our mandala painting further. We can experiment with blend modes or apply filters (we added a touch of zoom blur here). There’s also the myriad of other options in the Brush tool, like Scattering and Smoothing, that we can use in combination with the Symmetry setting. Once done, we can also go on to combine our paintings with images. This is easier than it looks, all we need to do is drop in a suitable photo, like the eye image here, then use a few simple blending tricks to combine it with the painting underneath.
1 Create the base
Make a new document (File>new) or use a photo as a base (we used a blurred image). Make a new empty layer for your painting. Grab the Brush tool and choose a colour. Click on the ‘butterfly’ icon in the tool options at the top to enable Symmetry Painting.
2 Paint with symmetry
Choose Mandala and set a number of segments for your painting. Paint with the brush and you’ll see the strokes appear in several places at once. Try increasing Smoothing to 100% in the options for smoother lines. Experiment with different colours and brushes.
3 Play with brush settings
Click on the brush panel icon and tweak the brush settings. Check Scattering and increase Scatter. Go to Brush Dynamics and up Size Jitter. Check Brush Tip Shape and increase Spacing. Click Colour Dynamics and increase Hue Jitter. Paint to create scattered dots.
4 Blend and filter
Set the layer blend mode to Color Dodge, then apply the Radial Blur filter (Filter>blur>radial Blur). Merge a copy of all layers with Cmd/ Ctrl+shift+alt+e. Go to Filter>camera Raw Filter. Get the Radial Filter tool, double-click the image and lower Exposure to create a vignette.
5 Transform and repeat
Choose a Profile in the Camera Raw settings to alter the colours (we used Artistic 01). Hit OK, then duplicate the layer with Cmd/ctrl+j and set the blend mode to Lighten. Hit Cmd/ Ctrl+t to transform, then hold Shift and rotate the layer 45 degrees. Press Cmd/ctrl +Shift+alt+t twice to repeat the transform.
6 Blend an image
Drag-and-drop the eye image in, hit Cmd/ Ctrl+t to transform and resize it to fit, then change the blend mode to Overlay. Duplicate the layer with Cmd/ctrl+j, then double-click it. Drag the ‘This Layer’ white point halfway in, then hold Alt and drag the left half of the slider all the way across.