How to Make Snowflakes in Photoshop

It's easy to blow your Christmas budget before you've taken care of everyone on your list. One way to hold down costs is to make your own Photoshop snowflakes for Christmas cards and decorations. Using the same technique you can make dozens of snowflakes, every one as unique as you.

Instructions

1. Create a square-shaped canvas in Photoshop, 500 to 600 pixels on each side. File resolution need be no higher than 150 pixels per inch, and 72 ppi will work fine with most inkjet printers. Type the dimensions in the "New File" dialog and use a transparent background.

2. Drag a horizontal guide and a vertical guide from the ruler to the center of your document. This will help align your branches. If you don't see the rulers, choose "Rulers" from the View menu.

3. Select the rectangle shape tool and set the tool options to "Fill Pixels" in the tool options bar. Drag a rectangle from the center guides to the top and halfway to the upper right image margin.

4. Cut the rectangle into a triangle. Use the polygon lasso to create a selection from the rectangle top right side to the bottom left and back to the bottom right. This will create two triangles, one selected and one not selected. Delete the selected area.

5. Cut irregular shapes from the edges of your triangle using the lasso, polygon lasso and elliptical marquee tools. The look is up to you. You can trim back corners, cut semi-circles from the sides or cut wedges into the triangle.

6. Rotate a copy of your shape. Open the Layer palette and drag the layer to the "Create a New Layer" icon. Choose "Free Transform" from the Edit menu to choose the transform options in the tool options bar. Set the reference location to the bottom left corner and rotate 30 degrees.

7. Continue to duplicate and rotate your snowflake shape until you have 12 shapes rotating 360 degrees. Try variations of the series with different snowflakes. For instance flip your first triangle horizontally and align its right side with the original triangle's left side, then rotate five copies 60 degrees. Slightly reduce the size of some shapes and enlarge others.

Tips & Warnings

• If you don't like the color of your new snowflake, simply merge all the layers together and choose the "Color Overlay" layer style. With the color overlay you only need to change the selected overlay color instead of painting each of the wedges.

• Make sure to use the "Fill Pixels" option with the rectangle tool. If you use the path or shape options, this won't work.

• You must use a transparent background. Otherwise you will duplicate the entire image, background and foreground, each time your rotate.