PSD file available for download

Less than 2 month left till 2010 year. This is a good time to begin making something that will remind us about this great holiday season. We will be creating Christmas decorations and namely Christmas balls, the ones you use to hang on the Christmas trees.

So let’s start by making a new document:

Here we go.
So make a round selection by holding shift with you rectangular selection tool. Create a new layer and fill the selection with some color, now we have a new found layer. We’ll shade the forms later.

.. So our basic shape is ready let’s dropping some details.

… keeping every detail on a new layer.

Now it is time to shade. I’ll use a standard Photoshop brush with a little option set on.

Here are the settings of the brush (Brush Download at the of tutorial).

So the center shape is ready shaded. I wanted to give a little bit of aquarelic feel so I didn’t use soft edged brushes.

I’ve also applied the Paint dubs filter which can be found in Filter gallery if you are using the CS2 or higher version of Photoshop. Do the upper part of the ball using the same method: Use the filter as well.

… and the cap using the same method with different colors.

I really like to create an outline for my objects. I’ll use stroke patch method to do it. Select the objects first.

Right mouse click within the selection > make work path with 1px tolerance.

Then choose a brush you want to stroke with. I’ve chosen this brush. Settings:

Go to patch submenu, select the whole patch by clicking on it and tap Stroke path icon – stroke the path.

Stroke with the same stroke line the rest of the objects.

Now we got to have a lot of these Christmas balls
and that is why – copy the round shape – the first you actually did,
create a new layer, set its mode to overlay and choose green colored
soft edged brush to paint over the object. It will give us something
like this color.

Merge the layers to be 3 in total: so we now have orange, green and blue balls to play with. Let’s deal with background a little. I will make it yellow orange.

Let’s also make some of these little ribbons to each ball.

As it is a Christmas theme:
it will be good to add more holidays feeling more fun – and the star,
the sigh, symbolizes all this. I found a star brush in Photoshop and it
is even a Standard one.

Then create one layer somewhere in the middle of those ball layers and set it to overlay.
Here we go:

Almost
forgot: create a layer underneath all the layers and set it to overlay
too. Take a soft edged brush and set its overall opacity to about 10%.
Bring some glow to it.

Create
another layer at the top do a little airbrushing to create atmosphere
to the picture: use the same soft edged brush with 10% flow this time.

Create another layer – this time the mode is Normal: use the same brush only make it smaller.

Adjust the thing a little bit more. I’ve also dropped some texture using Texturize filter. So and that is basically it. This concludes our tutorial on making the Christmas Wallpaper.

Enjoy and have happy holidays.

DOWNLOAD Brushes: io.abr, op.abr
DOWNLOAD PSD: Christmas Balls PSD