Photoshop Quick Tips #11: Creating Glow Lines

Today I am going to show the basics of how to create a glow line, very easy but very useful. A lot of people have been using glow lines on their illustrations and it's really good to see a well worked piece with some good glow lines taking over, so let's learn.

First things first, open a new file on Photoshop, and put a black background.

Get the Pen Tool (P) with these settings:

And create your line the way you want. (If you never used the Pen Tool before would be good to check some videos tutorials here )

As you see I created my line, and every thing that you create using the Pen Tool appear on the Path Palette (if you don't see the Path Palette go Window > Paths), and will be saved kind of like layer as you can see above.

Now that we have our line/work path we are going to create another layer, go to Brush Tool (B) and select an small brush (I used 9 px soft round). It's time for the magic, go on the Path Palette and right click the work path you have for the line you made, and select Stroke Path. A new little window will pop up, select Brush and check Simulate Pressure.

This will make the brush that you have selected to go over the line that we have, this is the main detail of this tutorial, if you have a bigger brush the line will be thicker and so on, whatever color you have selected will also be showing.

And this is the result you should have so far.

Now that you already know how to make your lines you can use Layer > Layer Styles > Color Overlay to give the color you want to your line and to make it glow a little bit we will duplicate the layer and on the bottom one we will apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur (just enough to give it a little glow, I used 6.0 on mine) You can also give a different color to the layer with the blur so it creates a cool glow effect.

And this is what you should get:

Now that you know the basics, use your creativity to make your glow lines shine on your illustrations.

Thank you,

Download .psd file