This Photoshop tutorial features a step-by-step guide to creating a beautiful, glowing, floating color wheel poster. This is a poster was made to promote our creative agency Newfire Creations.

It’s only $12 per month and you get access to all .psd source files, bonus brushes, and bonus tutorials.  Check out the preview of this tutorial below.

Here is an example of what we will be making in this tutorial…  purrrdy….

Step 1:

The first thing we’re going to do is open up Photoshop and create a document that is print ready meaning we need at least a 300dpi resolution.  So go ahead and open a Photoshop document that has these settings:

Step 2:

We now have the canvas we are going to use.  The next thing we need to do is grab a sweet grunge background here.  For this design we wanted to make sure that we had a good contrast between grunge and a clean orb.  There are many grunge pictures out there that will give this same effect.  Bring this photo into your Photoshop document and scale it to fit the artboard area.

Step 3:

Now we’re going to create some of the initial glow effects that will be the main focus of our design.  We first select a basic circle brush from the brushes palette and give it the following settings:

We can then select our colors and start painting.  Be sure to create a new layer for every color you put down.  This way you can play with the opacity settings and get them to blend more favorably.  We used basic primary colors for our color wheel but feel free to use your color preferences. We used:

Blue/Cyan = #33cccc

Yellow = #ffcc33

Green/Lime = #99ff00

Red = #ff3333

Violet = #cc0099

(remember to keep each color on it’s own layer)

Here is a picture of our different layers.  We put them in a group/folder to keep a bit more organized.

Now set each layer to have an opacity of 80% so the colors blend a bit.

You poster colors should now look something like this:

Step 4:

Now we’re going to create the circle for the orb but first we need to

• duplicate the group/folder of our color glows
• hide the original folder with our color glows
  
• And then flatten the copied folder. We do this by clicking the copied folder and then pressing COMMAND+E on a mac. This process will put all the colors on one layer (you’ll see why later).

Now, draw a circle using the shape tool and make sure it is filled with black.  Try to center the circle over the color glow we just created  Here is a screen shot:

Step 5:

Add these settings to the shape layer:

Then a stroke color of 4d4d4d

The poster should now look like this:

.

Step 6:

Now move the flattened color glow layer about the circle shape layer so it looks like this: