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Stroking the path

Select the brush tool and use the setting below. Depending on your image size, you may want to select a larger or smaller brush size. A good rule of thumb is for ever 100 pixels wide or tall, there should be 1 pixel. For example, on a 800x600pixel image, you would start off with a 8 px brush size.

Select white as the foreground color. To do this quickly, simply press D then X. Pressing D will reset the colors to black and whiter and pressing X will switch the two colors.

Select back the Pen tool and right mouse click on the image to display the path option menu. Select Stroke Path.

A window will appear where you can select the settings. Use the settings below:

This is what your image should look like now. The path you created earlier should be stroked with a brush and it should start thin on the ends and thick in the middle. If it's all just one straight line, make sure that you have the "Simulate Pressure" option checked in the previous step. If you forgot to do that or if the brush size is too small or large, go to Edit > Undo to undo the previous step and correct the setting. If you want to change the stroke size, select back the brush tool and change the brush size. You may also undo and experiment with other brush shapes and settings, but we recommend, if you're doing this for the first time, sticking with one that will produce the similar results as the image below.

Now we'll add some lighting effects to the stroke. To do this, we'll use the Outer Glow layer style. Right mouse click on the Light Swirl layer and go to Blending Options. Enable Outer Glow and select blue as the color. Adjust the spread and size to get the results that you desire.

Your swirl should now have a blue glow around it and look like light instead of paint.