Ever wondered how you can create a brushed metal effect in Adobe Fireworks in just a few steps ? Read this post to learn how.

Brushed metal is a metal usually made of stainless steel, aluminum and nickel , that is characterized by having a pattern of horizontal very fine lines. There are several finishes of brushed metal , but in here we tackle only one and leave the rest to you to alter any changes for the different finishes.

1. Start with a blank canvas, canvas size depends on what you’re most comfortable with, I’d usually stick with 1200 x 900 or more just in case I want a bigger area.

2. Create a vector path with a solid fill by using either of the polygoon tools ( rectangle, ellipse, polygon etc ) or the pen tool to draw your path. Choose a gray color for the fill.

3. Apply a noise filter to your solid path. On the properties panel, click the plus sign to add a filter, and select noise. Leave the default settings as is, usually its around 50 and uncheck color box.

4. In the filters panel, click the plus sign again to add a motion blur filter. Change the angle to 0 and the distance to 100. Or you can play around with the settings, incase you want a different direction for the fine lines ( use angle ) , or the extent of the lines (distance).

5. Last step would be to feather the edges of the path , we do this so that the white areas of the lines pop out a bit more. A feather value of 30 is good enough. And finally, we use the scale tool to scale the path so that it looks like a rectangle, take note the object might go out of the boundary of the canvas , so don’t worry so much about this.

So there you have it, the brushed metal effect in Adobe Fireworks in a few steps for beginners and experts alike. Select the object and save it as a style for future projects.

Or if you wish to use it as a pattern or texture fill , make something like a rectangular brushed metal image below. I covered all the areas here, actually there are like two brush metal paths in this image and save it as a png. Then if you want to use it as a Pattern or Texture, just select Other and find the source file.

Click to download > brushed metal fireworks file . If you have any questions regarding this tutorial, just leave a comment below.