Hi. This is Marty from Blue lightning TV.
Photoshop version CC has a feature that many people don't know it has.
It's called "Variable Radial Symmetry".
This feature essentially allows you to draw beautiful spirographs or mandalas with your brush or pencil tools.
Create a new document by going to File and New.
I'll make the Width and Height 1000 pixels each and its Resolution: 150 pixels per inch,
however, you can make them whatever size you'd like.
The Color is RGB and 8 bits per channel.
Open the Background Contents and pick white or you can click the box and pick white.
Then, click "Create" or Open.
In order to open the symmetry feature, we need to enable it in our Preferences.
Go to Edit, Preferences and "Technology Previews".
Check "Enable Paint Symmetry".
I'll open my Pencil Tool, however, you can also use the Brush Tool.
If you're using the Pencil Tool, as well, open your Pencil Picker.
Make its Size anywhere from 2 to 5 pixels with a Hardness and Opacity of 100%.
If you're using version CC 2018, you have an additional feature called, "Smoothing".
This feature smooths out your brush strokes in real time.
So, for example, if the Smoothing is 0, you 'll see that when I draw, the lines are kind of jittery.
I'll press Ctrl or Cmd + z to undo it.
When I increase Smoothing to 100, my lines are much smoother.
I'll cover the Smoothing feature in more detail in a future tutorial.
For now, I'll keep it at 100%.
Click the butterfly icon to open the list of symmetries from which you can choose.
To create a mandala or spirograph, click "New Dual Axis".
This creates a vertical and horizontal line as reference.
It opens with a Transform Tool's bounding box that can be resized, repositioned,stretched
or squeezed.
However, since we're creating a symmetrical mandala spirograph, let's accept it's default
symmetry as it is by clicking the check-mark at the top.
Open your Paths path panel.
If you don't see it, go to Window and Paths.
We can create a mandala by either renaming our path, "Radial Symmetry 12" or " Mandala Symmetry 10".
The radial symmetry maximum amount is 12, while the mandala symmetry maximum amount is 10.
We'll see the difference between the two symmetries in a moment.
As we paint on our document, Photoshop repeats and rotates the paint strokes around the radial axis.
However, if we want to mirror our paint strokes,
we'll rename the path, "Mandala Symmetry 10".
Since we'll make this into our finished mandala, open the Layers panel
and click the New Layer icon to make a new layer.
We'll use this empty layer to paint the strokes and use the background layer for the background.
This time, as we paint, Photoshop is mirroring the strokes as it rotates them around the axis.
Make the background active Let's fill it with gradient colors.
Open your Gradient Tool and make sure the Radial Gradient icon is active.
Open your gradient thumbnails.
You can click any one of these or to see more choices, click the gear icon.
I'll click "the "Noise Samples" preset, but feel free to choose whatever you like.
When you see this message, click OK to replace your current gradients with the gradients you just picked.
I'll click this one.
Once you click yours,
go to the center of your design and press and hold the Shift key as you drag straight across.
Make the mandala active and click the New Layer icon to make a new layer above it.
In this empty layer we'll create another gradient, which will fill the mandala.
To do this, we need to clip this gradient to the mandala, so as to not fill the background.
Press Ctrl + Alt + G on Windows or Cmd + Option + G on a Mac
or you can go to Layer and "Create Clipping Mask".
Click a different gradient.
Go to the center and this time, I'll drag it to the upper, right.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
Thanks for watching!