Water Tentacles

Step 1

Create a new document

Width: 400 Pixels
Height: 400 Pixels
Background: White

and change your Foreground Color to #EDA74C and Background Color to #FFFFFF.

Step 2

Take the Gradient Tool

and drag from the top of your canvas down to roughly the middle of the canvas to create a soft background to anchor our colorful tentacles.

Step 3

Create a new layer and name it "Main Tentacles", also make sure it's the layer you are currently on. Take the Rectangular Marquee tool and make a selection like what we got below ensuring to make the selection somewhat thick.

Step 4

Change your Foreground Color to #FFFFFF and Background Color to #A6A6A6. Grab the Gradient Tool again then from the middle of your rectangular selection you want to hold shift and click and drag towards the right or left side of your selection.

Step 5

Press CTRL + T to bring up the transform stuff then Right Click and click Distort. Hold Shift + Alt and grab the bottom right node(little box) and drag it towards the center. You want to ensure you get the nodes on top of each other at the bottom so you get a nice point on your tentacle. Then press Enter to apply the transformation.

Step 6

Deselect and then duplicate layer. Set the previous layer to invisible:

Step 7

With the current visible layer active go to Filter--> Distort--> Shear, here is where we get to shape our tentacle. What I did is moved the top node(small box) to the left a little. Then a little further down I clicked towards the right to create another node. Then went back to the left and made another node. Play around till you get something you like in the preview box(Press Defaults to reset the nodes) then press OK.

Step 8

Now here is a neat trick I learned. Apply the Plastic Wrap filter to give it a nice 3D look:

Highlight Strength: 9
Detail: 9
Smoothness: 2

Lets give it more 3D touch by adding an Outer Glow:

Step 9

Lets add an Inner Glow now

You want enough to give your tentacles enough depth but not too much so it makes it look flat. Now bring up the Hue/Saturation box to color your tentacles.

For the first tentacle I choose to make it red, choose whatever you like.

Colorize: Checked
Hue: 0
Saturation: 68
Lightness: 0

Grab the Move Tool and you should see close to the top of your tentacle there is an inner glow with the move tool drag up your tentacle so you don't see that part.

Step 10

Now we are going to add water splashes! Wow! Copy the image below and paste it right onto of your current image in Photoshop.

Name the water splash layer "Splash". Your layer palette should look like this right now.

Step 11

Change the Blending Mode of the "Splash" layer to Color Burn. Now you want to position the splash so you got a fair amount of the splash on the tentacle but not too much, if you need more splash just copy the layer or make your own splashes. Below show's how we got ours positioned.

Step 12

Now on your tentacles layer (Main Tentacles Copy) load the selection. Inverse the selection and go back to your "Splash" layer(one with the blue blotches) and press the delete button to get rid of the excess water splatter.

Step 13

Alas, we apply the Plastic Wrap filter once again to give the Water Splatter(Splash Layer) some depth.

Highlight Strength: 9
Detail: 9
Smoothness: 2

Step 14

While the "Splash" layer is active link it together with the "Main Tentacles Copy" layer

and then create a New Layer Set with the linked layers.

Step 15

That is basically how you make a tentacle. To create another tentacle duplicate the original "Main Tentacles" layer you hid early in this tutorial then follow Steps 6 - 14 again making sure to duplicate the layer still so you can create more tentacles.

For Step 7 ensure you play around with it so you got your tentacles going different ways. Also to change the tentacle colour for step 9 for the Hue/Saturation just slide the bars around. Feel free to make your own water blotches or make another shade of blue for other water blotches to give variation.

Final Product

Poof... there you have it, once you get the hang of it it's a very good effect for splash pages and such... let your imagination run wild and create something nice... also maybe keep the tentacles silver will look nice still.