Photoshop Tutorial – Christmas Fairy Magic – Fantasy Art

This tutorial was originally published on loreleiweb.com and moved to pswish.com for technical reasons. After the huge success of the previous two fantasy art tutorials, i wanted to do something like that again, but different… hope you will like this one, feedback is as usually appreciated!

So, today we will make this:

Start off by making a new canvas, 500*500 pixels. The colour is irrelevant as we will overlay it with a photo later.

Fish out a photo of clouds from somewhere. I used some free stock on DA, but since YOU will probably make a picture for private use, you can use almost any photo u find.

We are still gathering material. Next step is to find a nice girl we will turn to a fairy… As always I used liam-stock.deviantart.com but again, this is up to you, you may use your own photo just as well.

Select the clouds photo and paste it unto your 500*500 canvas. Then, crop the girl carefully, and paste it unto your canvas either, above the clouds, more or less in the center.

Make a new layer. Using a white color and a Brush Tool with a radius of about 250 px, make a “stamp” above the girl.

Now, just like we did in the Moon Eclipse Tutorial, using the eraser tool of almost the same size, cut most of the stamp you made, in order to leave a small, “young” moon.

Go to Layer >> Layer Styles >> Outer Glow, and add White Glow to your moon. See illustration HERE.

This is what you got so far…

Select the Clouds layer and go to Filter >> Renders >> Lightening Effect. Apply this lightening effect exactly on the place where you have your moon.
Lightening Effect

This will result in having darker sky around the fairy, and the only lit area would be around the glowing moon.

Now, we will try to create an illusion of stars, that were laying in the fairy’s hands and now that she has blown on then, they scattered all across the sky. So, we need star brushes. Basically any brushes you personally like on DA would be good, see the URL below for more info:
DeviantArt Free Star Brushes

After having downloaded and installed your brushed, make a new layer and apply a several stamps of brushes, close to fairy’s hand, as shown on the picture below.

Apply same glow settings as you did with the moon before.

Now some more complicated work, with Levels. As we want our sparkling stars to be really shining, and the overall atmosphere of the picture to be bluish and mysterious, we will Flatten the Image (don’t skip it!!) and then press Ctrl + L (to get to the Levels panel) and set the following settings, for…

Red channel:

We got a much blueish hue to our photo.

Take a photo of the clouds u used before, and paste it unto your canvas once again. Make sure the new layer lays above the background.

Erase 2/3 of it, so that the remaining clouds, will only cover the girls legs, partly. Use the eraser tool with soft edge, preferably big radius, to avoid sharp and awkward edges for the cloud. it’s a cloud after all!

While the new clouds layer is selected, go to Levels panel again, and adjust the red level as shown below.

The settings must be different from the background layer , to give the image more depth.

Flatten the image once more. Now it became one canvas again, without layers, so go to Filter >> Renders >> Lightening Effect and apply this light effect when the center of your light is the sparkles…

The last manipulation resulted in the following modification…