I was inspired while working with the beautiful snowflakes tutorial by Pracken. Follow Pracken's Snowflake tutorial to make the first snowflake. While you are there, look around her tutorial site. She has so many wonderful tuts to play with you might get lost there. Bookmark her site. Remember to come back to this tut when you can.
Materials needed.
PSP - I used version 9
A pastel gradient.
You can use the one I used. I will happily give credit to its creator when someone tells me who made this gradient! bhw_bluee.pspgradient (Download, unzip to your gradients folder.)
Start with a large background image (600 X 600 pixels)... and floodfill it with a bright solid color so you have a good contrast to your white snowflakes. You will reduce the size later.
Add a new layer and make a snowflake using Pracken's tut on that layer complete with dropshadow.
Create a new layer and make another snowflake using a different letter.
Create a new layer for each snowflake til you have several flakes of different sizes and shapes. Change font sizes on each layer. I used font sizes 72 - 120.
Use the mover tool to move the flakes around until you have a nice uneven but attractive pattern.
Hide your background layer and merge the visible layers so you have your snowflakes on a transparent background.
Select your merged layer and use your selection tool to draw a rectangle loosely around the outside of the snowflakes and crop the image to your selection.
Unhide and select your background layer and floodfill with a soft gradient.
If there are lines thru your gradient, add noise - setting 4%.
Stop! Save your image in PSP format- layers UNMERGED.
Save it as mastersnowflake.pspimage. You can use this master image for the background tile or to do the animated tile/tag below.
Click for the animation tutorial.
Once you have saved your master copy, duplicate it (Shift + D)
Close the original and work from your duplicate.
Highlight your snowflake layer and duplicate it. Mirror or flip it and move the snowflakes around to create an offset effect. Here are two examples.
Image A |
Image B |
When you have a pattern you might like, duplicate your image and using the duplicate, merge your visible layers.
Effects > Image Effects > Seamless Tiling with the settings below. Use the preview pane to see what your tile will look like.
Go back to your original tile and flip or mirror and rearrange your snowflakes to get a different effect. Duplicate the orginal, select the duplicate, merge the visible layers and use the seamless tile tool again. The key to this is to play with the settings and layers until you find what you like. Saving the original with all the layers intact lets you change the background and move things around to get different effects.
If you want your background tile to be lighter and easier to type over, lower the opacity of your tile and merge all > Flatten.
Below are backgrounds (reduced in size) to show you the outcome of the two samples I used above.
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