To begin, open a new file, 16 million colors, with a background colorof a medium shade. Here I've chosen basic blue.
 
 

Pick a lighter shade of the same color, or a lighter color that goeswell with your background and use the airbrush to spray some on. Make sureyour airbrush is set to a nice large size - about 20 pixels or so.
 
 

Now here's the easiest part. Select the Retouching tool (the littlefinger) and set it to Smudge. Set the Paper Texture to None, the Shapeto Round, the size to 60 or 80, the Hardness to about 60, the Opacity to75, the Density to 100, and Steps to 1. These are about the settings thatI use, but they are by no means carved in stone. Other settings may alsogive good results. The only real requirement is that your size be set LARGE.Now just click on your image and make sweeping diagonal motions. Your colorswill swirl and blend together
 
 

Continue to sweep back and forth, starting from the upper left corner,with your diagonla sweeps move down to cover the entire image. The besteffects are obtained when the smudge brush strays out of the window atthe end of each sweep. This avoids leaving artifacts of a smudge wherethe brush stopped travelling
 
 
 
 

Depending on how much you smudge, you can get very dramatic changesin color over small areas, or your pattern can be more subtle and nearlyhomogeneous. The nice thing is that the results are subtly different everytime.
 
 
 
 

After you've made your pattern, you can get some wonderful new onesby duplicating the file and then adjusting the hue, saturation, and lightness.I won't lie to you, some of the patterns you'll get this way could makeyour eyes bleed, but many are very pleasant, such as the orange patternbelow.
 
 
 
 

mixing three or more colors can also give pleasant results. For thepurple pattern below I started with a white background and then sprayedon dark and light purple before smudging.
 
 
 
 

A wide range of color combinations are possible. The only reall problemwith these is that they don't always tile very well when made seamlesswith the Selections: Convert to Seamless Pattern command. If you have theDCSpecial filters PatternEdit Do and PatternEdit Undo (available at GrafoManiac),you can do a litle tweaking at the seams. Because these patterns are soeasy to make, I usually just start with a very large file when I make them,that way the pattern doesn't have to tile when I do a fill.
 
 

So, what do you do with these patterns after you create them? Well,stained glass is one possibility, or perhaps a sort of Cloisonne effectlike the one below.