How to Make a Snow Globe in Fireworks

With the advent of inkjet printers and special paper you can now create and send your own greeting cards to family and friends. A great image to add to your card would be a snow globe. They're fairly easy to create in a program like Fireworks and they can celebrate any winter holiday.

Instructions

1. Open your background image in Fireworks. It doesn't have to be a winter scene. Any image you want to show through your snow globe will be fine. Paint your snow globe base or drag a selection from another image. Add an object to go inside the globe (an angel, Santa, a kitten, it can be anything you want) just above the background and globe base.

2. Draw a globe with your ellipse tool. Hold the "Shift" key down to make a perfect circle. Fill it with a radial gradient made from a slightly darker color from your background to white in the center (you may have to tweak the gradient direction to get it just right).

3. Create a white rectangle to fill the image. Apply the noise filter (which will convert your rectangle to a bitmap). Adjust the noise setting until you have a good mix of black and white.

4. Select the black areas of the snow layer with the Magic Wand to and "Select Similar" command (Select Menu). Use the "Expand Marquee" command to expand the selection by 1 pixel and delete the selection. Open the "Levels" command from the Filters menu Adjust Color submenu and drag the middle slider to the left until all of the black speckles disappear. Add the "Gaussian Blur" filter (about .5 radius) and your image will appear to have large patches of falling snow.

5. Use the magic wand tool to select the transparent background of the globe layer. Expand the selection by 4 pixels. Make the snow layer active and delete the selected snow.

6. Drag the globe layer to the top of the layers palette and apply the "Hard Light" layer blend mode. Adjust the opacity until your globe turns into glass.

Tips & Warnings

• If you have access to Photoshop filters, you can load them using the "Filters" option in the preferences. The Photoshop "Spherize" filter can refract the selected area of the background behind the globe and the object and snow as well to create an even more realistic appearance.