Step 1: Create a blank document of any size and fill the background with black or another dark colour (I used a medium grey). You can make it any size you want, but if you want to use the swirl horizontally, you have to make the height as big as the length of your spiral. (it's best to make it very long - you can always delete parts of it).

Step 2: Grab the brush tool and choose a soft brush of any size - just don't make it too small or you will lose the light effect. Select white as your foreground colour and draw a straight line from top to bottom. You can easily make a straight line by holding shift when you drag your cursor downwards. Your image should now resemble the one on the left.

NB. I used a 13pt soft brush, but the size you need will undoubtedly depend on your individual project - feel free to experiment with different sizes.

Step 3: Now select filter > distort > shear from the main Photoshop menu, and make a zigzag line that looks like the one on the left. Yet again... you should experiment with different types of zigzags to find one that suits your own individual tastes. Press OK to apply the effect to your image.

Step 4: Grab the object you want to wrap your swirl around and place your swirl exactly on top. You can rotate the spiral as you see fit, but your end result will be better if you keep it perfectly horizontal or vertical. In this case I've decided to wrap the spiral around a simple pipe.

Step 5: To create the illusion of depth, start deleting parts of the swirl. Take a closer look at the picture on the left to see which parts you need to remove. You just grab your lasso tool and select the parts you want. Press DELETE and you should have something like my example opposite.

Note: This is easier if your object is separate from the background - that way you don't have to pay much attention to pixels outside the object. You can just select the the object and deselect parts of the selection by holding down the ALT key.

Step 6: To create an extra light effect, copy the layer and apply Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 5px. You can personalize your swirl a bit by adding colour to your blurred swirl. Just press CTRL+U to open the hue/saturation window. Now tick colorize and turn the lightness down just a bit and slide the saturation slider all the way to the right. Choose a nice colour by sliding the top slider to the left or right and press 'OK'. I chose a nice light blue colour. Now change the layer blending mode to color burn and turn the opacity down to your taste.

Step 7: To finish it up, grab your burn tool and burn just a little part of the swirl where it disappears behind your object. You can add some sparkles to make it even better, and repeat step 6 with your sparkles as you did with the swirl. And that it - you're finished! Once you have done this a few times you'll get the hang of it and be able to personalize it further. If you are especially proud of your work, please post an example in the forum. It is always nice to see what other people make of this effect.

Variations: This is a collaboration between me and 5-0... He made the 3d-render and I did the Photoshop work. I used the swirl effect here. Draw some inspiration from it if you like, and get that mouse moving!

Click here for the full un-cropped image.