Adobe Photoshop Brushes can be used for abstract digital artwork as well as the common grunge and tech brushes you can find all over the internet. This abstract brushing tutorial will teach you how to brush your abstract renders!

1. Make a new document, and select a dark background color for it. My document is 640x480 and I have selected black for my background. My image is a bit small so that it is easier for viewers to see the whole process.

2. Now insert your render into your image on a new layer. I made my Render in Cinema 4d, and saved it as a TIF with an alpha channel. This lets you select only the render when your inserting it in your new picture by selecting the alpha channel in your TIF, and Copy Pasting the selection.

3. Now we need to add a Color Balance Adjustment Layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance).

4. A box should appear called "New Layer". You can title the layer or just click ok. After you click OK, the Color Balance Box should appear. I will tell you the settings I used, but feel free to set it up however you'd like. First locate the Tone Balance section of the Color Balance Box and select Highlights. After that, Use these settings and hit OK:

5. Now for the difficult part. Here is where you should start developing your own techniques, but hopefully this will get you started and teach you the basics of brushing behind a render. I will go in depth as I can on how I Brush. First, select your paintbrush and make a fairly big size brush with the hardness set to 0%. My brush size will be 100 (a bit smaller than I usually use because my canvas is fairly small). Select white as your foreground color and create a new layer under your render. Now paint a blob/circle in the middle of your render. It should look a bit like this:

6. Looking good so far. Now, select a smaller brush, and try to fill in a rough amount underneath the rest of your render. When your finished, it should look similar to the image below:

7. This is the base of your brushing. You wont need your brush much anymore except maybe for some fine details. The rest of the brushing will be done with the smudge tool and eraser. First lets select the smudge tool. Set it up like I have:

8. Now, go over your brushing on part of your render (I am starting at the top), and move your smudge tool up and down to get a similar effect like the one I show below.

9. If you are having trouble making your brushing look like this, try some of these techniques. First, try moving your smudge tool parallel with the renders sides and moving it in and out of the render to make it look "Spiky". Try making the center of the render have more brushing come out than any extruding points or parts. If it still looks plain, try rapidly moving the smudge tool back and forth (zig zag) over the brushing to give it a "Firey" look. When you are done with that, bring parts of the brushing back in by pulling the smudge tool from outside the brushing towards the render. If it still looks bad, keep experimenting. You will eventually find somehting you like, it took me a while to get my brushings to look like something I would like.

10. Keep moving along your render and keep brushing like you did to the first part. You can make it interesting by extruding parts of the brushing more than others, or by making swirls or spikes in some spots. Try to keep your smudges going towards the outside of your render, as smudging towards your render will give it an "interesting look"...

11. All right, we now have most of our smudging behind us. The next step is erasing part of it. Select an eraser tool using the following settings:

12. This part takes a lot of experimenting and is different for every render/brushing. Start off by going over the edges of some of your brushing and erasing part of it to give it a "Cloudy" look.

13. Its up to you how you want your brushing to look in the long run, so keep experimenting however you would like. I am going to go over with a small eraser tool now and make some little changes.

14. Now duplicate the layer with all of your brushing. Go over it again with the smudge tool and pull out the brushing even more than it is already. Don't Overdue it. Pull some parts back in and bring some parts out so you keep some texture in your brushing from the eraser tool. Here is whet mine looks like:

15. If you want, you can erase parts of this brushing again, and duplicate it again, and keep repeating these steps until the image looks how you like it, but we are just covering the basics today. We now want to give our render some extra brushing to make it seem like it is exploding! Take a pretty big sized brush again for your paintbrush tool, select white as your foreground color, and make a blob on a new layer above your render.

16. Like it? Hope so! We aren't done yet though. Pull out that smudge tool again and disperse the "explosion" layer so that it goes outside of the render. Pull it in on some parts as well. In my work, I brought it out on the points, and pulled it in in parts of the render where there was less extruding going on.

17. Now pull out your eraser tool again and make it BIG. We want to erase enough of the explosion to give it some texture.

18. And there you have it. You can keep playing around with yours, again, these are just some basics that I have used in some of my abstract renders. You can keep adding stuff to your render to make it more original and attractive, and you probably should also add a background. Here is what My final image turned out to look like.

Now that wasn't so hard was it? Or maybe it was... Either way, I hope this tutorial helped in someway or another.