Photoshop Swirl Effect from a shoe

Capture a shoe

Or you can find at this link: White Converse

This is pretty straight forward. You’ll notice the shoe in the picture I linked is quite massive, so I made a new document, size 1000×1000 in photoshop, opened the picture of a shoe, pulled it into the the 1000×1000 document and resized it so it was easier to work with (takes deep breath after ridiculously long sentence). Just go to Edit -> Free Transform, and make it a bit smaller, so that it’s down to a size you can work with.

To make the nice swirly effect we’re going to use a combination of the pen tool and the brush tool. Select the pen tool. Look at the bar at the top of your screen and make sure the paths option is selected:

Then go ahead and draw a nice spiraly shape as I have done below:

Now open the brush window. If you don’t know where that is, try going to Windows -> Brushes. Make sure you have the brush tool selected, and select the brush as shown below, which is just a regular size 13pt brush.

Make sure smoothing is ticked, and click on Shape Dynamics, and give it these settings

A word of advice: the number beside “Fade” should be changed depending on the length of what you’ve drawn with the pen tool. What we’re trying to get is a sharp point on the end of the spirals. Therefore if you’re not getting a sharp point when we do the next step, or if the spiral is ending too soon, try altering this number until you get what you’re happy with.

Set your foreground color to a nice bright color like #ed1447. Make a new layer and select the pen tool again. Right click and select Stroke path…. Change the drop down to “Brush” and click OK.

Right click again and select Delete Path (we don’t need it anymore).

Now, grab the pen tool again, and draw a shape around the edge of the shoe like below.

Right click, and select Make Selection…, and click OK. Make sure the swirl layer is selected and press delete. Finally, go to Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen. You should have the something like this:

Continue with this technique until you end up with something like this: (I’ve listed the colors on this image)

Next I made another shape like below with the pen tool

Right click on this and click on Make Selection… and click OK. Select the orange swirly layer, and press delete. You should have something like this now: