With less than 3 weeks until Christmas, it’s a good time to start wrapping the presents and sending out holiday cards. This new tutorial is here to help you create unique Christmas themed patterns and digital papers to give your holiday projects a more personal touch.
I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS5, but you can use this tutorial as a guide even if you prefer other graphic editors.
This pattern is made with the free dingbats I’ve shown you earlier. You have to download and install the fonts before starting. Please remember that these are free for personal use only. If you want to sell your digital papers, make sure you purchase a commercial license.
This tutorial follows the same steps shown here. Let’s get started.
Step 1: How to make a Christmas themed seamless pattern
First, open a new image. I’ve set mine to 200x200px at 72 pixels/inch. Always use a bigger pixel density if you want to print your work. I always leave the white background and unlock the layer before starting.
You can make this with digital stamps or clip-art, brush sets, or you can even draw some Christmas themed images with your mouse (you can do this in Adobe Illustrator or a free software such as Inkscape).
- add the images you want using the Text Tool or drag and drop the clip art onto the canvas
- you can leave them all black (I’ll show you how to change them later) or use a different color for each shape you add
- make sure they are positioned in the center of the image, don’t go over the edges
- if you are using dingbats, then select all the layers except the background, then go to Layers/Rasterize/Type
- after this merge all the layers
- now go to Filter/Other and choose Offset
- enter 100px in the Horizontal and Vertical text boxes and make sure Wrap Around is selected (the values are half of your canvas’s Horizontal and Vertical values)
- you can add other elements to fill the pattern, but don’t go over the edges
- make the white background invisible or delete it
- go to Edit/Define Pattern to save it
Step 2: How to make your digital paper
- open a new document and choose the size you want
- make a new layer
- go to Edit/Fill and choose your new pattern from the list
- at this point there you will have a white background and black dingbats so we should change the colors
- select the background layer (Layer 0) and fill it with the color of your choice using the Paint Bucket Tool
- now choose a color you like for the images and make it the background color (see image below), select the second layer (Layer 1 in my example), and press Ctrl+Shift+Del
- now let’s choose a different color for some of our images
- I’ve selected random images using the pen tool and colored using the method from above
- if you are not familiar with the Pen Tool, you can select them using the Lasso Tool
And it’s done. Now save your pattern and use it for your holiday projects!
