Free Photoshop Guides

Our ornament is really coming along. All we need to do now is the snowflakes. To do this, first create a new layer (call it something like “snowflake base” and Ctrl+Click on the “ornament” layer in the Layers palette to load its selection. Now fill this selection (on the “snowflake base” layer) with black. The black layer should obscure the ornament and part of the ornament topper underneath, like so

Now take the custom shape tool and select one of the snowflake shapes (you should have a couple to choose from). Select the option to create “filled pixels” instead of paths or shape layers and begin drawing white snowflakes, on a new layer, above the “snowflake base” (call the new layer “flakes” or something similar). It doesn’t really matter if some of these flakes extend beyond the edges of the base layer/ornament. In fact, it will look better if some of them do.

Now Ctrl+Click on the “snowflake base” layer in the Layers palette to load its selection and, with the “flakes” layer active, go to Filter - Distort - Spherize. Click “OK” to accept the default values.

Then hit Ctrl+ Shift+I to invert your selection and hit delete. Followed by Ctrl+E to merge the “flakes” layer with the “snowflake base” layer.

Now, our snowflakes are a little blurry because of the distortion, so let’s clean that up. Go to Filter - Sharpen - Unsharp Mask and enter the following settings:

(This was our whole point for creating the “snowflake base” layer to begin with, so we could later sharpen the edges of the snowflakes.)

Now set the layer mode to “Screen” and lower the layer opacity to 40%. There you have it, a finished ornament (I added a little drop shadow just to make it pop off the canvas a bit).

You can download the PSD file for this tutorial.

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Added Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 10:41 am under Drawing & Painting.