Liquid Chrome RGB Droplets in Photoshop

The other day I was checking out old videos I, for some reason, uploaded to Youtube. I thought a few times about starting doing video tutorials, but I never moved forward. My biggest excuse/concern was that it would be too robotic. As I said, excuses… but I found this little video of how to create some quite nice water droplets in Photoshop. So I decided to give it a try and create an image with it. I just went further, I modernized with a nice chrome 80s look. So here it is.

Step 1

Create a document in Photoshop. I am using A4 format because it looks like a nice poster aspect ratio. Then with the background layer, fill it with a very subtle gradient from super dark grey to dark grey. It’s important that the background is not pure black because the Blending Modes might not work with black.

Step 2

Select the Brush Tool B and let’s create a dynamic brush. Here’s what I did:

Step 3

Paint the canvas with your new dynamic brush. The color doesn’t really matter because we will change it with Layer Styles.

Once you’re done I recommend you convert this layer to Smart Objects so you can change it later and it will propagate to all new instances we will create.

Step 4

Layer Styles time. You can use the video in the beginning as reference or the images below.

Step 5

So your brush now might look like liquid metal or some sort of retro-chrome material. Make 2 copies of that layer. You will have 3 layers then, rename them to red, green and blue.