Hello all. In this tutorial i will teach how to make a stylish disco ball-like, with some nice “ground” effects that you can use in your party flyers. The techniques applied involves knowing the basics of layers and paths.

Create a new file in Photoshop with these properties:

Fill up your background layer with a blue solid color. To fill the background layer you can use the FILL command, under the EDIT menu, or you can simply select the color you want as your foreground color and the hit ALT+BACKSPACE. The color I used is this blue:

Now, as your file is 600px width by 600px height we’ll draw 2 guides to determine the exact center point of the file, wich is at 300px width and 300px height. To create the 2 guides go to the VIEW menu and choose the option NEW GUIDE. Then create and horizontal guide at 300px and a vertical guide at 300px too.

Now, draw a circle in path mode. When in paths mode there is no change to the layers because you’re just drawing a vector, with no stroke or fill. You’ll need an empty layer later to fill the surroundings of this circle, but we’ll get to it later. To draw the circle in path mode, select the ellipse tool from your toolbox and make sure that you have it in path mode:

Look at the top, below the menu to see the options. Make sure you have paths mode selected:

To draw the circle from the center, click on the center point (the intersection of both guides) and with the ALT key and the SHIFT key down, draw a small circle, about 70-80px diameter. The ALT key is used to draw an ellipse from the center (being the center the clicked point) and the SHIFT key is used to constrain porportions to a 1:1 basis, thus creating a perfect circle:

Now lets add some “dots” to the countour of that path. If you’ve done everything right you’ll notice that nothing happened to the layers (use F7 to bring up your layers palette). In paths mode you are just creating vectors, without stroke or fill, and now you’ll need to stroke them or fill them. You can see this vectors in the PATHS palette, wich is docked with the layers palette:

Now lets select the brush. Go to the toolbox and select the BRUSH tool:

Select the foreground color to a lighter blue. I’ll go with this one:

Now go to the Brush options palette and use the following values:

Basically, just turn everything off, and select a diameter of 10px, 100% roundness and 150% spacing. You can leave smoothing turned on.

Go to the layers palette and create a new layer:

Make sure that the layer you’ve created is selected.

Now go back to the paths palette and choose the bottom icon that says “stroke path with brush”:

Go back to the layers pallete. You now should have the new layer with a dotted contour around the circle shape. Check your file, it should be like this:

You can still see the vector path. That’s beacuse you still have it selected in the paths palette.

Ok, so now lets repeat the last step a few times. You dont need to draw the circle again, you can duplicate it in the paths palette. Go to the paths palette and drag the existing path to the “create new path” icon:

Now use the Transformation tools to rescale this path. From the EDIT menu choose TRANSFORM PATH and then SCALE. Look at the options below the menu:

Click on the lock between the width and height percentages to lock the aspect ratio. Now you only need to enter one value that the other automatically changes to reflect the exact porpotions:

Change the values to 130%. Now you need to reshape your brush. Use the same options as in the step before but increase the diameter to 15px.

The result is:

Now repeat this step until you have 7 or 8 circles, all increasing in size. You should come up with something like this:

Well, the way i did it involves a bit of drawing, but its quite easy. First lets disable the last layer visibility:

Now, create a new layer. This layer will be used to draw the sphere that will be the crystal ball.

To draw a crystal ball just like mine you will need a new pattern, with transparent background. First lets draw a small rectangle in this new layer. You will need to draw the rectangle in FILL PIXELS mode or you wont be able to create the pattern. Grab your RECTANGLE tool from the toolbox and make sure you’re in FILL PIXELS mode:

Now draw a small square, say abot 10×10 pixels. You can use the same color as before, the blue:

Now make sure that all the layers have visibility turned off except for the one with the square. You should have only 3 layer, one being the background, another with the circles and another one with the small square:

Now use your rectangular marquee tool to create a selection around the square. You’ll want to zoom up a little bit in order to create a nice selection around the square, a selection that itself will also be a square:

Now, with the selection loaded, go to the EDIT menu and choose DEFINE PATTERN. Name it and your’re done.

You can now delete this layer and unload the selection (drag the layer to the trash icon at the bottom of the layers palette to delete it, and press CTRL+D on your keyboard to unload the selection).

Now create a new layer. Go to the EDIT menu and choose FILL. In the dialog box choose to use a PATTERN to fill the layer and select the pattern you’ve just created:

Now grab your paint bucket and with these colors go and paint some of the squares:

The final result should be something like:

In the last image i allready turned on the backgrounds visibility back on.

Now, with the layer with the squares selected, go to the FILTER menu, choose DISTORT and then SPHERIZE. Use the following values:

There you go, there’s your sphere:

Now, lets get rid of the background of the sphere. This is a result of the Spherize filter, in order to get rid of that we just need to create a elliptical marquee around the sphere and the so a simple COPY + PASTE

Select the elliptical marquee tool:

With the SHIFT key pressed draw a circle marquee starting at the top left corner until the right down corner (at the edges of the file). You can also start the circle marquee from the center (leaving ALT key pressed as well as the SHIFT key).

To copy press CTRL+C and CTRL+V to paste. You can also use CTRL+J to create a new layer from the selection.

Now you can delete the last layer (the layer right below the copied one).

There’s our sphere:

Ok, we’re near the end now. First lets resize the crystal ball, make it a little bit smaller. With the top layer selected (the layer with the crystal ball on it) go to the EDIT menu and choose TRANSFORM and then SCALE. Make it about 50% smaller, push it over to the left side (with the MOVE tool) and rotate it a little to the left (using the ROTATE under the TRANSFORM option in the EDIT menu):

Turn back on the dotted layer (wich was invisible) and select it. Now lets add some perspective to it. Go to the EDIT menu, choose TRANSFORM and then DISTORT. Grab the corner angles to distort it in a way that the center of the dots goes directly below the bottom of the sphere, like this:

Now lets hide the portion of the dots that are behind the sphere. You can still see these dots because the sphere is not completely opaque. We could have made it so, but this way we can add more stuff “inside” the sphere.

Select the layer with the sphere and make sure that you have your RULERS turned on (under the VIEW menu). Click on the rulers and grab guides to the left, right, top and bottom of the sphere. Now draw a elliptical marquee using the guides to create an exact same circle as the crystal ball:

With that selection loaded, create a new layer and fill it up with the same color as the background layer:

To fill the layer you can use several options, like the FILL command under the EDIT menu, or just the ALT+BACKSPACE to fill a layer (or a selection) with the foreground color.

Now, you need to bring that layer below the crysral ball. Just click on it and drag it beneath the crystal ball layer. There it is:

Lastly you can add up some nice effects to the crystal ball and to the background. To add shadows you’ll need to add them in the background of the crystal ball layer or else every square in the ball will have a shadow. Lets add a simple drop shadow:

Use these values when the dialog box comes up:

There you have it:

To achieve an eye catching composition you should add some gradients to the background too, and of course the color of the text you’ll put on top will also have a great weight on the final result. Here’s one i’ve tried, with some more drop shadows, gradients, inner and outer glows and some text:

Hope you liked this one. Have fun!