First, find a picture of anything with a hole at the top. I mean, you could probably do this effect coming out of someones mouth but it would be preferable to have it against a black background. So I’ve went with a picture of a regular cup, just for simplicity. You can find it HERE. Save it, drag it into photoshop and go to Select -> Color Range and sample that nice purple colour along the side. Click OK and press delete. I then Resized this image and put it on a new 1000×1000 document, and filled the background with black. Here’s a picture of what I’ve got so far:

A key part of this tutorial is going to be the gradient tool, specifically the foreground to transparent gradient. You can find this by clicking on the gradient tool and then clicking on the arrow at the side of the current gradient on the top bar. It’s the second gradient in the list. Change your foreground to white, and change the gradient type to “Radial Gradient”. Start drawing gradients on a new layer until you end up with something like below:

Now set this layer to “Overlay”. Now we’re going to draw another few gradients in white again on a new layer, like below.

Let’s add some clouds. Make a selection of this new layer by holding ctrl and clicking on the thumbnail. Now go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds (Make sure your foreground is black and your background is white!)

Now, to finish this layer go to Filter -> Render -> Difference Clouds, and then Image -> Adjustments -> Hue/Saturation or Ctrl+U (Command on a Mac). Tick the colorize box and try and get a nice Orange color. These are the settings I’m using:

Set the blend mode on this layer to “Overlay”.

Okay, so now what you want to do is take the gradient tool again, set your foreground to #e51681, and select the foreground to transparent gradient tool again. Draw something like below with the radial gradient tool on a new layer, and set blend mode to Soft Light.

Now Duplicate this pink layer and change blend mode to Normal. Go to Filter -> Liquify. On the left of the liquify window, find the “Turbulence Tool” option and click it, or alternatively press T. I’m using these brush settings:

Instead of me showing you exactly what I liquified, and what directions I liquified in, I’m going to let you try doing it by yourself, so you can sorta be a bit more creative. What you’re aiming for is something like this though

Now change the blending mode on this layer to “Linear Dodge (Add)”. A little tip is to use the eraser tool with a hardness of 0% to tidy it up if you have any problems with your final liquify. I even used this on the bottom as there was a large amount of pink at the bottom which I didn’t want. Anyway, continuing with the tutorial, duplicate the layer you just liquified, and go to Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur using the following settings:

Finally, set the blend mode on this motion blurred layer to Difference.

Again, more gradients. You’re probably getting bored drawing these things, I know I am. Draw a gradient with the Radial gradient tool (again) like below on a new layer. Below I’ve actually done two radial gradients on top of one another, to make the center brighter.

Set the blend mode on this layer to “Overlay”. It should make the area considerably brighter. Now duplicate this layer twice, so you end up with 3 copies of it. You should have something like below at this point.

Grab your favourite set of splatter brushes. I’m using this set by itsJ2o which you can find HERE. What I did was I found a nice big brush, size 1514px, and on a new layer (in white) I drew the brush just under the cup like below.

Set the blend mode on this layer to overlay. What you’ll probably notice is that now the cup looks really dirty as it’s covered in sparkles, so to fix this what I did was used the eraser tool with a hardness of 0% to rub all of that out. Mess around with the eraser tool a bit until you get the effect you want. Here is what I ended up with:

And again, we return to the gradient tool. This time in red. Change your foreground to #e34040, and select the foreground to transparent gradient (again). Make a few selections at the top of the document using the eliptical marquee tool.

Start drawing gradients in this area (try and make it blend in, so that it’s a smooth transition from red to the black background). Now go to Filter -> Render -> Clouds (again, make sure your foreground color is black and your background color is white). Now set the blend mode on this layer to Color Dodge. Move it around a bit, you know, mess about with it until you are happy with it. I rubbed bits out, altered the gradient I’d drawn, etc, until I ended up with this:

And that’s it! You’re done!