PS Tutorials: creating tentacles, recover from old archive

When brushing through my old archives I came across with one of my old graphics of tentacles. The unique technique involved in manipulating the tentacles, I am going to share the designing process in this tutorial post.

Final Product, this is one of the many ways that you can take advantage of the manipulated tentacle.



Step 1:
Run your version of Adobe Photoshop and open a new document, size of the new file may not cause much of a different although in here I have used 700 x 800 px blank white RGB 72px/inch ideal for web graphic file.

Step 2:
On the left side tool pane, second tool from top, select the "Rectangular Marquee tool" (if the rectangular marquee is not selected, then you will have to right click the marquee tool and select rectangular tool from the sub menu) and as shown in the image below draw a rectangle in the middle of the graphic to show as 1/3 of the graphic.

Step 3:
Having the middle of the graphic selected, click on the gradient fill tool from left side tool pane. From the top tool bar make sure you select "Reflected Gradient". After that click on the middle of the graphic and drag outside the previously selected area so you will get a gradient like shown below. After that press Ctrl+D to deselect the selected area. (The dotted lines should disappear)

Step 4:
Now we need to transform the shape of the rectangle to a triangle. To do this, press Ctrl +T or go to Edit>Transform>Perspective If you press Ctrl+T, then right click on the gradient area and select perspective as shown below.


Step 5:
Having the transform selected to perspective mode, drag the top corner either right or left towards the center so the top would become pointier.


Step 6:
To give the shear appearance to the triangle tentacle we have right now, go to Filter > Distort > Shear then as shown below play with the trend line on top until you arrive at a decent looking tentacle.


Step 7:
Congratulations, you have created a tentacle. You can modify this and colorize using Hue/Saturation as below.

Follow the same method and make several of those tentacles and you will have some generated graphics to play with for your graphic design.