Creating a Christmas E Card

It’s Christmas time, and to celebrate the season I’ve put together a simple tutorial to design an E Card to send your friends, family, clients, or whoever you think could think could use a bit of Christmas cheer.

Step 1: Setting up the canvas

Let’s start by creating a new 500×300 canvas. Set the resolution to 72 px/in, and color mode to RBG color, 8 bit.

Next we’ll apply a gradient to our background layer #AD0404 to #870404.

Step 2: Add some snow

Create a new layer called “Snow” (Ctrl + Shift + N). Use a soft round brush and set the size somewhere around 15px.

In your brush settings pallet apply Scattering and Other Dynamics as follows, be sure your foreground color is set to white.

Step 3: Add a lens flare

Add a new layer called “flare” and fill it in black (Ctrl + Backspace). Then go to Filter>Render>Lens Flare and set the brightness to 50%, and select 50-300mm Zoom. Click the bottom right corner of the Flare Center section and click OK.

Now set the blending options of this layer to Screen. Duplicate this layer (Ctrl + J) and go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical. Then move the new image up and to the right a few pixels.

The lens flare adds some lighting effects across the entire image, which I chose to get rid of. Just use the Erase tool as you see fit and get rid of the parts you don’t want.

Step 4: Add the tree

Grab this Christmas brush set http://flina.deviantart.com/art/Christmas-brushes-103012446 and select the “tree1″ brush and set the size to 400px. Place the tree on top of our snow/lens flare layers. Then go to the blending options and set the Color Overlay to #870404, and Outer Glow to white.

Step 5: Adding icons

Now we’ll add a couple of Christmas icons. I used a Santa Clause and a Christmas present. Resize them to your liking, be sure the present is over the Santa Clause and let’s give it a drop shadow to make it stand out a little bit.

Step 6: Adding the text

I chose a nice script font from Font Squirrel called Beautiful-ES. I chose a slightly smaller font size for “Merry” and positioned the text in the upper left corner of the canvas.

Step 7: Adding your own touch

Now we have a template for a nice E Card. Add your message in the middle of canvas and send it off!

You can download the final .psd file here.

Categories Featured, Tutorial

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Author Bob Pease