Water Ripples

Step 1: First start off with a canvas 800x600 at 150 ppi, this ppi rate is a nice size to do art with. Next make the background a gradient of dark blue and black, with black at the bottom and of the canvas rising just over half of the page.

Step 2: Get out your air brush with a diameter of 35 and set the foreground to white and background to a blueish gray. This will give you a cool open water feel for you image

Step 3: In a new layer make horizontal stokes in white, located in the center of the image,
once this is done apply a guassian blur filter>blur>guassian Blur of about 0.6
to soften the edges a bit more.

Step 4: On this same layer you can apply your grayish-blue strokes as well but make sure
you have more white color than grey-blue. Once again apply the guassian blur at 0.6.

Step 5: Now we will apply the twirl filter Filter>Distort>Twirl. But before we do this
make sure your lines are centered in the middle of you image as the registration point for this filter in center image. Apply your filter making the angle 384.

Step 6: We need to transform the twirl now to make it seem as if it is laying flat
on the canvas, so reach for the transform tool EDIT>TRANSFORM>SCALE and squeeze the middle so the length is smaller than the width. Once you do this apply the Guassian blur again to smooth out the pixilated edges.

Step 7: Now select the marquee tool and feather the edges to a radius of 8 and make an
oval around the swirl.

Step 8: With the selection live apply the zigzag filter FILTER>DISTORT>ZIGZAG set the
amount to 30 and the ridges to 5 then hit apply, once that is done with the selection
still active, apply the zigzag filter again (Ctrl/Cmd +F)

To finish the piece off I added a few more layers of the pool swirl in various layer modes with drop shadow and highlights. some text and a drop..