Today’s 30 Days of Aviary Tip: Liquify, Melting

Today’s tip is pretty simple: I’m gonna show you how to make stuff look like it’s melting using the liquify tool! You can also check out the more in-depth liquify tutorial.

Basically what you want to do is select the “Liquify Tool” (it’s the painters pallet icon at the bottom of the tool bar) and then click inside the area you want to melt and then drag to the outside along the contours to ‘draw’ the liquid ‘drips’ out of the source color. Think of the way a beed of candle wax rolls off a melting candle, and move the Liquify Tool curser like that.

Repeat this step until your color seems to be ‘pouring’ into other areas of the image. But it looks a little flat, doesn’t it? You can solve this by creating a new layer and drawing black (for shadows) and white (for highlights) over the ‘wax’ to give it depth. Lower the hardness and alpha of your shadows and highlights until they look natural—you can also try adjusting their layer’s alpha.

The liquify tool has a lot of cool uses, if you can think of any, send them in and we’ll post them here!

Tagged: 30 Days of Aviary