In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this really cool, Mystical Golden Sphere in Photoshop. The steps are in fact pretty simple and the outcome looks great in my opinion, have a try :)

We will be using some drawing techniques, plus customer brushsets and filter effects along the way, plus I will show you a clever use of Photoshop brush to create special effect around the sphere.

Here is a preview of the final effect: (click to enlarge)

PSD File for this Tutorial

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Ok let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Abstract Brushset 1

Abstract Brushset 2

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800 * 800px, fill the background with black colour. Create a new layer called “bottom light” and use a 250px soft round brush with white colour, do a single click in the centre of the canvas, then resize it  (Ctrl + T) to a very thin shape as shown below:

Grab the eclipse tool (U key) from the toolbox, create a new layer called “sphere” and draw a circle on top of the light, as shown below:

Apply the following layer blending options to this sphere layer:

Drop Shadow

Inner Shadow

Gradient Overlay

and you will have the following effect:

Step 2

Create a new layer on top of the “sphere” layer and use the eclipse tool to draw another oval shape to the top of the sphere. Name this layer as “highlight top” and change the blending mode to “overlay”, drop the opacity to around 40%.

You will have the following effect:

Duplicate this highlight layer once and apply the following Gaussian Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

change the blending mode of this duplicated layer to “soft light”, you will have the following effect:

Step 3

Now let’s add some irregular lighting effect to the sphere. Create a new layer just above the sphere layer, use a soft white round brush to so a few single click around the sphere, set the blending mode to “soft light”.

Hint: make sure to paint some light on the bottom of the sphere, this will help adding more depth into the image.

The following effect is what I have so far: (the light strip on the right was done using the free tranform tool + a soft white round brush on a new layer with “normal” blending mode:)

Create a new “Shadow” layer on top of the “bottom light” (first layer) and use the same method as described in step 1 except using black colour instead of white, do a single click and resize it into the thin shape.

Change the blending mode of the shadow layer to “overlay”, you will have the following effect:

Step 4

Now we can add some effect around the sphere to make it look mysterious. Use the abstract brushset 1 we downloaded, choose any one of them and reduce its brush size to a smaller size, paint around the sphere as shown below:

Create another new layer and use the Abstract brushset 2 to paint some patterns on top of the sphere, as shown below:

(Hint: use the Free Tranform tool to distort, warp the new layer to create variations)

Here is what I have so far:

Add a new texture layer just above the background layer, and use the same brushset as we used just now, but this time with its orginal size, paint some patterns on the lower half of the canvas, as shown below:

Make sure you mix different brushset and set the opacity and flow to both around 50%.

Step 5

Now let’s add the golden colour on the sphere. The trick here to add a Color Balance adjustment layer just above the original “Sphere” layer, with the following settings:

and you will have the following effect:

add the following Curves adjustment layer on top of all layers:

and you will have the following effect:

Step 6

Now we can do some final touches to the image. Firstly let’s flatten the image, duplicate the background layer once and apply the following Radial Blur settings to the duplicated layer:

Change the blending mode to “Screen” and you will have the following effect:

Now we don’t really want to the whole image to be blurred, so we can add a layer mask as shown below to hide some parts:

Also apply the following Smart Sharpen settings to the background layer:

and you will have the following final effect: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Of course you can further enhance the effect and try out more colour schemes and filter effects, but that’s totally up to you.

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Until next time, have a great day!

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