Christmas card

Introduction to working with shapes in Photoshop

A shape is a vector description consisting of points and angels, this gives the ability to resize objects without affecting the quality of the object. We will now briefly describe the different tools used to create and manipulate shapes, if you don't understand all of it now don't be worried it will get clearer when you start drawing your Christmas card.

Pen tool: Creates shapes by placing points in the working area. When the mouse pointer is held above the first point a small circle appears by the mouse pointer symbolizing that the “circle” will be closed once clicked.

Add anchor point: Is used to add a new point in an existing shape if you discover that you need an extra point to get that perfect shape. When you have the shapes outline visible simply click on the line to add a new point.

Delete anchor point: Does the opposite of add anchor point, if you click an existing point its removed.

Convert point tool: Converts points to anchor points which you can adjust the angel for.

Direct selection tool: Is used to select a single point, when you have clicked a point you can click and drag the point to move it. If you click an anchor point you can move its handled to adjust the angel of the curve.

Path selection tool: Selects the entire shape ass opposed to the direct selection tool. If you click and drag a point the entire shape is moved.

Setting up the working area

An ordinary Christmas card has the proportions of an A6 sheet, which measures 148 millimeters wide and 105 millimeters high in landscape mode. When you create a new image that is destined to be printed you should adjust the resolution to 300 pixels/inch to ensure good quality of the card once printed.

Contours

Lets start with creating the contour for our Santa's body. Select the Pen Tool (P) in your Tools window. Now you will see the options for the pen tool in the options window, select “Shape layers” and “Create new shape layer”. These options will create a new shape in a new layer from what you draw with the peen tool.

In the second image bellow you will see how we placed our points, don't forget to close the shape by clicking in the first point when you are finished placing points. Now its time for the Direct selection tool (A). If you click on the contour line of the shape you have created you will now see the points you placed earlier. The points can be selected individually by clicking them and can then be moved by clicking and dragging them. By holding down Ctrl + Alt you will access the Convert point tool, which will convert your points into anchor points. If you click and drag a point with the convert point tool you will see two lines with handles pooping out of the point, with these handles you can control the angel of the point. The contour line will bend between your points depending on how you adjust the angel of your points. When you have the handles visible on the points you can go back to using the Direct selection tool again to modify the angles using the handles. Using these techniques of adjusting the angles and moving the points you can modify your shape so that it looks like ours in the third image bellow.

Making the arm

The body shape was a very easy shape to start with, now we move on to the right arm which will require a new step. In the first image bellow we have placed the points required for the right arm shape, the problem is that we want a different color for the glow then the arm itself, but if we fill the shape now the whole shape will turn black. The solution to this problem is to create holes in the shape with the Peen tool option “Subtract from path area”. Draw two smaller boxes inside the arm and don't forget to close them by clicking in the first point. Now the arm should look like the one in the second image bellow, and the only thing remaining is the shaping of the arm with the same technique as in shaping the body, which should result in something like the third image bellow.

Making the other parts

We have now gone through the different techniques needed to draw the different parts of our Santa clause. The remaining parts is drawn in the same way and is then easily assembled into a complete Santa clause. In the image bellow we show you the different parts needed for our Santa clause, both with the points visible and how they look once they are filled.

Decoration

As some extra decoration we made some Christmas trees and snowdrifts. The Christmas trees can be made using the same technique used to make the arm, by setting up the contour of the Christmas tree and then make holes in the shape. Since the snowdrifts should be white you only have to do the contours of the drifts to illustrate them.

Coloring

Now its time to add some color to the card and since we now have the contours its and easy match. We created a new layer underneath every shape layer to place the color on, we then used the Lasso tool to make a selection round the contours of the part we were about to color and then used the Paint bucket tool to fill the selection with the desired color. To make a nice sky we used a gradient on the background layer, depending on what mood you want in your card you should select different colors for the gradient, we choose black and dark blue to get the feeling of a night sky.

Shadows and snow

To create a greater perspective in the image you can place some shadows on the Santa clause and snow on the branches of the Christmas tree.

If you want to create really slick shadows you can create separate shapes for these but change the opacity of the layer to about 30%. If you want to make simpler shadows you can simply create a new layer which you place on top of the other layers and change to opacity to around 30%. On this layer you can then simply paint on the shadows using the Brush tool wherever you want a shadow.

The snow on the branches was created by placing a new layer above the color layer and underneath the contour layer.

To finish this tutorial of we downloaded the suitable font Christmas Card for our Christmas card, and the result is what you see in the image below.