It’s interesting where inspiration and ideas for articles comes from. This time round it was from somebody who sent me an email asking how I made the image I used in an article so I thought I would include it here  (mostly so I can remember how I did it!). To do this tip you need Adobe Photoshop though I guess the general principles should translate to other image editing packages.

In Photoshop you need to create a new document, I made mine square 3000×3000 pixels with 300dpi – no particular reason for that it’s just something I do often.

Now, click on the Shape tool and select Polygon.

Choose an interesting colour from the palette, then on the toolbar set the number of sides for the Polygon to 3 and draw out a Triangle whilst holding down the SHIFT key to ensure it doesn’t spin around.

After that press CTRL-T to transform the triangle and make it thinner – then make it longer than the Canvas. I set my width to 300 pixels and height to 2000 pixels. Next, move the center point of the shape to the thinnest point of the triangle then set the X and Y positions to the center of the Canvas.

You should have something broadly similar to the image shown on the right.

That’s the hard bit done, the next bit is a doddle and is where the magic happens.

Select the shape (Ctrl-T) and specify a rotation figure of 15 degrees (next to width and height). Press ENTER to accept the figure and the triangle should be slightly rotated.

Now, just press CTRL, SHIFT, ALT, and T at the same time and do it 23 times – to give you 24 triangles (because you already had one to start with)with each triangle rotated 15 degrees from the last one (to give a 360 degree shape).

Again, it should now look something broadly along the lines of the image on the left. If not, make sure you set the center point to the thinnest part of the triangle.

If all is well, great, that’s almost job done.

Now all you need to do is drop in a new Layer and fill it with a complementing colour, gradient, or whatever else you want.

Move this new layer so it sits beneath the one with the triangles on and you have a ray burst. Finally, flatten the image, and crop to taste.

You can now add whatever you want over the top. Here, as they say, is one we did earlier.

I hope you find this tip useful and happy ray burst creating!