Create a Beautiful Christmas Card

on Dec 18 in Drawing by Paul

I’ve created a cute Christmas Card for you and a tutorial on how to make a similar one! Hopefully, it will be useful for you and you’ll like it! Let’s start!

Christmas Card Final Preview

Below is the card that we are going to create. Click on the last screenshot to see the larger version.

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Step 1

Open up the Adobe Photoshop and create a new document with dimensions set to 1280 x 800px. Fill the background layer with black using “Paint Bucket Tool (G)”.

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Step 2

Grab “Gradient Tool (G)” and create a gradient from top to bottom. Use #badbec color at the top and #cde7f1 at the bottom.

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Step 3

Create another layer and fill it with any color you like. This layer will be used to brighten up the center part of the image. Go to ‘Layer Styles’ and decrease its ‘Fill’ to 0%. Then, turn on ‘Gradient Ramp’ and change its ‘Blend Mode’ to ‘Soft Light’. Use black and white for colors, change style to ‘Radial’ and increase scale to 150%. Don’t forget to adjust the opacity afterwards. 65% works well in my case. Below you can find the settings I used as well as the background after changes.

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Step 4

Grab ‘Pen Tool (P)’ and draw a couple of rays coming from one point. Once you have all the necessary paths right-click on the canvas with ‘Pen Tool (P)’ still selected and choose ‘Make selection…’. Fill the selection with white on a new layer. Change layer’s ‘Blend Mode’ to ‘Soft Light’ and ‘Opacity’ to 50%.

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Step 5

Grab your ‘Pen Tool (P)’ again and draw a few hills in the foreground and the background. This works the same like in the previous step but you don’t have to change their blending mode and decrease their opacity this time. When you are done grab ‘Brush Tool (B)’. Hold Ctrl/CMD and Click on the layer with one of your hills (in ‘Layers’ window). By doing this you will select the hill. Set your brush to soft, rounded one and use #e1f2ff as foreground color. Carefully paint a light blue coat on top of the hill. Repeat this process on the other hills.

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Step 6

Switch back to ‘Pen Tool (P)’ and start drawing a Christmas tree to the right. Put all its ’segments’ on a separate layers.

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Step 7

Continue drawing your Christmas tree but change the colors each time you draw a new segment…

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Step 8

Once you have all of them your Christmas tree should look similarly to mine one.

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Step 9

Hold Ctrl/CMD + Shift and click on every layer that creates your Christmas tree. Once you have all of them selected go to ‘Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue/Saturation…’ and pick a color for your tree that you like. Just play with the different settings until you get something cool.

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Step 10

Duplicate the Christmas tree a few times and resize the copies. Place one in the bottom-left corner of your image and a few in the background on top of the hills.

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Step 11

Now it’s time for another part of the card. You’ll need a pattern (available here: http://pattern8.com/free-repeat-patterns/free-repeat-pattern-with-a-hot-retro-feel/) to create the front side of the card. Just download it, open it using Adobe Photoshop and go to ‘Edit -> Define Pattern…’. Once you’ve done that create a new layer in your main Photoshop document and fill it with any color. Go to ‘Layer Styles’ and choose ‘Pattern Overlay’. Use newly created pattern here.

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Step 12

It’s a bit dull actually so let’s use a ‘Brush Tool (B)’ to create some huge black and white dots on a new layers. Set these layers to ‘Soft Light’ and decrease their opacity if necessary. Create two big black dots at the top of the image, one white in the middle and a few black ones at the bottom. I suggest to make each dot on separate layer.

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Step 13

Create a new brush with the following settings. Use it to paint some stars (see the screenshot in the next step).

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Step 14

It’s a bit harder step. Basically, you need to add in some decoration to your Christmas tree. There are only a few simple shapes on my illustration. I’m leaving it up to you how you place them and what colors you choose. They can be drawn using ‘Pen Tool (P)’, ‘Ellipse Tool (U)’ etc.

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Step 15

Finally, add a text to your Christmas card. I used font called ‘Victorian LET’. There are also a few Christmas icons that can be found here http://www.clevericons.com/icon/christmas06/

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Step 16

Let’s merge both images…

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Final Touches

You can make your image darker and add a moon like I did. I have also added some snow using ‘Custom Shape Tool (U)’. Stars were painted using ‘Brush Tool (B)’. Colors were changed by adding ‘Hue/Saturation’ layer on top of appropriate layers.

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Conclusion

You can actually use only a snow scene to create your Christmas card or only the one with the red background. Try to experiment yourself and I’m sure you’ll come up with something interesting! You can post your work below to show it to the other people! I hope you enjoyed my tutorial!

I wish Merry Christmas and Creative New Year to all of you!

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