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Here is an example of the finished product: This also might be useful in conjunction with the Scott Effect to make a treebark texture.
Start with a blank white image and do the click all over thing with the gradient tool, as per noclayto's Foil Paper tutorial (one thing I did discover is that you want to have adaptive supersampling turned off...its slooooowww).
Once you have that, stop there, you want things to be rounded not sharp as for the foil paper.
Next, add a new transparent layer and do filters>render>clouds>plasma. Max out the turbulence setting.
Blure the layer with Gaussian blur for a 10 pixel radius.
Next, fire up Iwarp (filters>distorts>iwarp) and set your deform radius to 50. Use the CW and CCW tools to get something like the image below:
Now filters>artistic>oilify the layer, set at 15
Then do filters>artistic>cubism with a value of 10 (on larger files you may have to twiddle the values for oilify and cubistic. And yes, this is part of the lava script fu...it gave me the idea.
Next, repeat the oilify, same settings.
Now do filters>edge detect>edge. Use Sobel and max out the setting. You should get somthing like the image below.
Do Select>by color and select a black area. With this selected, do edit>cut. Now you will have mostly the lightning like highlight areas. Set the layer properties of this layer to darken only. Try fiddling with the opacity. The next two show the effects of this, kinda cool by themselves actually...by the way, you can also try this with your earlier iwarped version, gives a really neat looking iridescent foil effect.
Do Layer>colors>desaturate. Do layer>colors>curves like below, or play with the settings, I like to pump the high values a bit.
Do filters>map>bump map. Bump map the layer to itself. It will look kinda ugly:
Use layers>colors>colorize to tweak the color to your liking, you get something like this:
Okay, so how do we make the sort of "vertical wrinkles?"
Make a new transparent layer just above your first layer. Using the gradient tool set to normal (back from difference) and using a triangular repeat, put your cursor at one edge of your image and drag your gradient line maybe an eigth of the way into your image. This will make a set of repeating gradient bars across your image, like this:
Set layer property for this layer to difference. It will merge it with the gradient foil layer you first made. Clear as mud?
Now for a couple of variations, this one has the bump mapped layer duplicated, but set to grain extract, the effect is of the two layers combined. Try setting the second layer to different things like multiply or soft light, cool effects. Very H.R. Geigerish.
