Aurora Borealis

This tutorial is copyrighted. Please feel free to visit as often as you like, but don't steal my work.

Needed tools:

A colorful gradient.
if you don't have one, feel free to use mine
Rainbow.zip

Right click and save this image to your computer
Psssst. To get this city line,
I went to http://www.google.com found one that I liked and tubed it.
If you don't like this one, it would be easy to get a different one.

Go to one of the sites below and get building tubes and build your own city line

http://dormargraphics.com/buildingtubes.htm
http://www.sjcreations.com/tubes-buildings.htm
http://www.ccdsscratchtubeheaven.com/tubesscratchbuildings.html

Open a transparent image 400 X 400.

Flood your image black.
Make a new layer named "line"
Activate your pen tool with the settings shown below.
In your color palette, foreground is a colorful gradient, background is NULL.

Hold your shift key to insure a straight line and draw a line the full width of your image.

Press and hold your CTRL key. When your mouse touches the line the word "add" will appear.
When the word add is visible you will be able to add a node.
Add a few nodes. In the image below I added 5.

Click ONE time below your line.
Now you will be able to grab your nodes with your mouse and move them creating a zig zag instead of a straight line.

Make your smudge tool active with the settings shown below.

Starting on the line and pushing UP smudge the line till it looks like the one shown below.

Apply Gaussian Blur, radius set to 8.

Your image well look like the image below, The colors are very dull. You may prefer it this way.
If you would like the colors brighter, make a duplicate of your line layer.

In your layer palette, merge visible. Copy.

Open Animation shop and paste as a new image (CTRL + V)

Click Effects > Insert Image Effect > Rotate colors.

Use the settings shown below.

Open the city.gif
Duplicate layers till you have the same number of layers as the colorful image.

Select all (CTRL + A) and copy (CTRL + C)

Activate the colorful image. Select all and paste into selected (CTRL + E)

Place the city image at the very bottom.

That's it. Resize to your liking, save your image and you're done.

I hope you have enjoyed my tutorial.
If you have any comments or questions, email me at:
kim@pixelbit.com