Peppermint a reader writes: "Fred, can you help me make a peppermint twist in Photoshop?" It isn't often that I get to have a little fun here, amongst all the image editing techniques. It's nect to get a chance to do some fun art from time to time. Actually I have no idea how to do a pepermint twist... but here's where I'd start: First of all we'll need our red shape. I've seen peppermint in all sorts so here I just did a thick and a thin stripe. ... Now we need the "twist" part. For that I tried several swirl filters, the wind filter and some others from Alien Skin, and so forth. I spend about an hour ditzing around with them and didn't get anything worth showing you. ... What we needed was a simple smear. So using the Smear finger, set to a large brush setting and a very light pressure I simply made my selection and rubbed the finger across the image just outside the selection. ... Why outside? With the finger and the airbrush you'll get smoother, more sensitive results if the tip is just outside the selection area. Let it "fog" its way in. Also remember that you hold down the shift key in order to constrain the spear to a straight line. Form the stick Once I was satisfied with the smear I trimmed it back to half the cylindar, copied it, and rotated the copy 180 degrees. (That's when I realized I shouldn't have used a thick and thin stripe... naturally 180 rotate won't match up... so I had to offset it.) Now comes the fun part

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