Lilac Creative

My December desktop wallpaper features a snowy winter scene against a starry night sky created using Photoshop. In this post, I'll give a step-by-step tutorial of how I did it. This tutorial assumes you have a general knowledge of how to use Photoshop gradients, the polygon tool, and the pen tool. Ready? Let's get started!

Part 1 - Creating the Background

Step 1: Night sky gradient

Fire up Photoshop and open up a fresh document (mine was sized 1680px x 1050px, for a standard high-res widescreen wallpaper). Select your gradient tool, and create a custom gradient that has a deep navy blue at one end, and a lighter electric blue at the other. Fill your background with the gradient so that the navy blue is at the top, and the lighter blue at the bottom. This simulates the way the sky is always lighter closer to the earth, even at night.

Step 2: Creating Snowy Ground Shapes

Next we need to create the hills of snow. Grab your pen tool and create two block shapes with wavy tops. Extend the bottoms and sides beyond the boundary of your document. Make sure the rises and falls of each shape are offset from the other, so that one hill is visible behind the other, as shown below. I made my back shape gray, and the front shape white to better demonstrate how they should look, but the color of the shapes doesn't matter right now--we're going to change that in the next step.

Step 3: Snowy Gradients

With the top shape selected in your layers palette, go to Layers > Layer Style > Gradient Overlay in the top menu, or just double click the layer to open up the layer styles window and go to the Gradient Overlay screen. Create a custom gradient that has a light to medium gray-blue at one end and white at the other, and adjust the gradient orientation so that the white is at the top of your curved shape, and the blue is at the bottom. Copy this layer style to the bottom curved shape, and then adjust the gradient on this layer so that the white is a very light gray, and the blue is a little darker. We want the lower layer to be slightly darker than the top layer to give an illusion of distance.

Once you've done this, pull the two layers into a group (select both layers in the layer palette and drag them into the file folder icon at the bottom of the layers palette), and label it "Snow". This will help us keep our layers organized as we work.

Step 4: Creating a Custom Star Brush

Next we're going to add stars to our night sky with a custom star brush. Open up a fresh document and create a black four-pointed star shape with the polygon tool (set the sides to "4", and in the Polygon Options panel, check "Star", Indent Sides by "75%", and check "Smooth Indents"). The polygon tool will automatically make the star of equal height and width, and we want our star to be longer than it is wide, so hit ctrl/cmmd + t and pull the bottom handle downward to elongate the star as much as desired. To make the star shape into a brush, go to Edit > Define Brush Preset, name your brush and click okay.

Grab your brush tool and select your new brush in the brushes menu. Now we need to adjust some of the brush's settings, so open up the brushes palette. On the Brush Tip Shape panel, set your brush's diameter to around 30px, and adjust the spacing to around 600%. Next check "Shape Dynamics" and in that panel set the size jitter to around 50%. Then check "Scattering" and in that panel set scatter to 1000% and check "Both Axes". Your starry-night brush is now ready to go!

Now create a new layer below your "Snow" group. With your foreground color set to white, swipe your new brush across this new layer to add stars to your night sky as desired.

Step 5: Making the Stars Glow

Duplicate your stars layer by dragging it into the new layer icon at the bottom of your layers palette. Select the bottom star layer, and then go to Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur and set the blur to about 7 pixels.

Step 6: Adjusting the Glow

Increase the intesity of the stars' glow by duplicating the new glow layer two times. Merge the three glow layers together (select all three glow layers, right click and choose "Merge Layers"). You should now have two star layers again: one regular star layer, and one glow layer. Adjust the opacity of the glow layer to suit your tastes. At this point, you may want to drag your star layers into their own group folder, and label it "Stars".

Step 7: Drawing the Aurora

Now we're going to create the Aurora Borealis in our night sky. Create a new layer above the Stars group and get out your brush tool again. Change the brush to a soft round brush of about 200px--the color you use doesn't matter (we'll be changing it in the next step). Now draw an irregular wavy line across your night sky, as in the figure below.

 

Step 8: Coloring the Aurora

The Aurora Borealis is multi-colored, so let's add some color to ours. Double click your aurora layer to open the layer styles palette, and go to the Gradient Overlay panel again. This time we're going to add a multi-colored/rainbow gradient. I used one of the stock rainbow gradients for this example. Once you've found (or created) a rainbow gradient you like, adjust the angle of the gradient so that the gradient washes over the aurora layer at an angle of around 45 degrees. Then click ok.

Step 9: Softening the Aurora

At this point, I found I wanted my Aurora to be a little softer and less defined. To achieve this, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and this time we want our blur to be around 60 pixels.

Step 10: Adjusting the Aurora

Now we're going to blend our Aurora so that it looks more a part of our night sky. To do this, we need to simplify our layer so that the layer style is integrated. Create a new blank layer, and select both the Aurora layer and the blank layer, right click and select "Merge Layers". Now change the blend mode (top left of the layers palette) of our simplified Aurora layer to Screen and adjust the opacity as desired.

At this point our background is complete! Stay tuned for part 2 of Creating a Winter Night in Photoshop, where I'll cover how to create some beautifully snowy pine trees and achieve some beautiful light reflections from the Aurora!