Today’s Yesterday’s 30 Days of Aviary Tip: Draw Lightening

Whoops, yesterday’s post didn’t queue properly, so here’s a bonus post today! And it’s a cool one! Here’s how you can draw realistic looking lightning in Aviary, it’s surprisingly simple!

The first step is to select the Paint Brush tool, make it a narrow number of pixels, and just draw lightning on a layer above your photo. Only do one or two ‘stands’ on one brush size, then change the brush size to do smaller branched-off strands, like how it’s done in this example picture.

The next step is to select the eraser tool and lower it’s alpha to 20% and it’s hardness to 0%. Use the eraser to fade parts of the lightning to make it look more realistic.

Finally, you’ll want to give it that ‘glow’. While the lightning layer is selected, click the Layer Filter button at the bottom of the the Layer Pallet. Select the “glow” option and adjust the alpha, blur, and thickness until it starts to look natural. After your lightning is glowing, you might want to also add some glow to the clouds using the Paint Tool to give the appearance that the lightning is illuminating the clouds.

And you’re done! This is a cool effect that can add a lot of ambiance to an otherwise simple photograph. If you use it in any of your creations, be sure to let us know.

Tagged: 30 Days of Aviary