At the time of writing this tutorial it was a little late for Christmas but over that period I had taught myself a technique for an easy to apply Christmas tinsel brush that could be used to knock up a fairly photo-realistic tinsel banner in no time at all.
Create a tinsel brush
Firstly open up a New Document (Ctrl+N) - Windows (Cmd+N) - Mac, and set the size to say about 200 by 200 pixels, Background set to Transparent -the size isn't important but 200 by 200 is a good size to work with as we can always resize down later.
Let's see what were working with, so click View / Fit on Screen from the Menu or (Ctrl+0) - Windows (Cmd+0) - Mac
[ that's the number zero not the letter O ] to allow you to see what you're about to draw.
Click on the Pen Tool (P) and start drawing your shape similar to the illustration below - Don't worry if you're not too great with the pen tool the shape your making doesn't have to look exactly like the one in the illustration just go for a general shape of something that looks like a many sided star or a spider with more legs than it knows what to do with, there won't be any need to use complex bezier curves just single click anchor points around to create the shape.
Pen Path
Complete the pen path until you have this sort of shape
Pen Path Closed
At the moment it's a bit thin on the ground and wouldn't make a thick and lush tinsel banner so I'm going to add another path to this one to fill it out better - and remember perfection is not the goal here, otherwise your tinsel will look too orderly and not realistic at all.
More Pen Paths added
As you can see from the image above I've cross over the paths here and there to give a more random shape this will give a more realistic finish. Now lets make the Selection by right clicking on the Work Path thumbnail in the Path Palette and selecting "Make Selection..." as illustrated below.
You will be prompted with the Make Selection Dialogue Box
Ensure that you have Anti-aliased ticked and New Selection radio button checked from the Operation sub-menu.
Select Edit > Fill.. from the menu and select Black from the drop down menu as illustrated.
Thus you have your brush shape ready to be turned into a useable brush, however we need to do a bit of tidying up as there is a lot of space over to the right side of the image which you may or may not have in your image but to tidy things up is just a simple process of selecting Image > Trim... and ensuring that Transparent Pixels is selected - this then crops away any unused space the image is sitting in.
So your brush shape finally looks something like this
Now you need to Define this as a Brush by going to Edit > Define Brush Preset... and the naming it
Congratulations you have complete the hard part and you can sleep soundly knowing that you will never have to create that particular tinsel brush again - so you can get right on with creating tinsel banners galour.
Creating a photorealistic tinsel banner using the tinsel brush
Now you have your brush you can do wonderful thing with it lets start by creating a tinsel banner (I say banner because I don't know what else to call it, but you know what I mean, or at least you will understand by the end of this tutorial)
Lets start by creating a pen path this will form the basis of your banner - you can use your imagination here perhaps use the penpath to write your name or Merry Christmas - in this instance I'm just going to have it curving around a bit.
So create a New Document (Ctrl+N) - Windows (Cmd+N) - Mac and set the size to whatever you perfer I'm chosing 640 by 480 and then click on the Pen Tool (P) and create some undulating curves to simulate a tinsel banner like so:
Don't close the path, unless you really want to, as most tinsel banners aren't circles of tinsel - you might want to remember this when writing a name in tinsel, as it will look more realistic if the ends aren't joined. Anyhow back to the path.
Now you have your path drawn you will want to select the Brush Tool (B) and using the Brush Preset Dialogue Box in Photoshop select your newly created tinsel brush as below
Brush Presets Dialguoe Box
Within the Brush Preset Dialogue there are many options to customise your brush so that it doesn't draw uniformly and gives a more natural realistic edge to your tinsel banner.
The ones we are going to be looking at first is the Brush's Spacing which can be found by clicking on the Brush Tip Shape button (highlighted in the left column of the illustration below) then you can adjust the Spacing Slider to open up the spacing between each brush shape which you can see previewed in the preview window at the bottom of the dialogue box. I've set it to 53% or so, but I could have chosen less for a more fuller effect. However at this point we will be creating the fuller tinsel banner by building up layers rather than using a single brush stroke so that is why I've kept it fairly thin at this stage.
Next we what to add some randomness to how each brush shape is laid because at the moment it's far to uniform to be realistic. So the next step is to add some Shape Dynamics.
Here I have set the Size Jitter to 30% the Angle Jitter to 50% and the Roundness Jitter to 33% limiting the Minimum Roundness to 16%, But please I encourage you to play to your hearts content here. I chose the above setting to create a less uniform shape and I'm fairly please with the setting in the Preview Window as it's starting to look like tinsel.
The next step is to add some Scattering which as its name suggests scatters the brushes which is useful if you want to create a spray effect, in this case we only want to add a little scatter of 10% to further randomise the tinsel. Ensure that Both Axis is not checked as that will move the shapes horizonally rather than limiting it to vertical movement which is what we want. I also increased the Count to 2 which doubles it's thinkness and already the tinsel is taking shape.
Now we can start to paint across our pen path so exit the Brush Presets Dialogue and then esnuring the path is visbile (if not click on the Path Palette tab and click on the workpath).
At the moment the brush is a little too large for the job so just resize the brush with the shortcut key ( [ ) which is the left square bracket - the right square braket ( ] ) increases the brush size. Tap the size down until your happy and then simply press Enter which will automatically stroke the path with the brush.
This is your first layer, create a new layer above this and go back to the Brush Preset Dialogue and make some random adjustments to the Spacing, Jitter, and Scatter not massive changes - the principle once again is that you're building up depth and make the tinsel look rich and full. After makes to tweaks to your brush once again (ensuring you are in the new layer) click Enter to stroke the path. Add another layer and make some more variations to the brush and stroke the path. By now you should have a rich full looking tinsel banner although some what bland coloured which we will fix next.
I have built up the richness of this tinsel banner by stroking a path on three layers with slightly different brush settings, the reason for doing this instead of creating a richer brush preset on one layer is that now we can add Hue & Saturation Adjustment Layers to each individual layer. Changing the colour and lightness of each layer will bring up a depth of colour that would not be possible with a single brush.
Point to note
I could have chosen to use a white brush when stroking the paths , or a 50% grey one, or any colour but as the Hue & Saturation Adjustment layers can alter the lighten it doen't really matter what colour you use.
Adding Colour Depth
Let add a Hue & Sat. adjustment layer to the bottom layer in the stack. you might want to turn of the visibility of the other two layes above it while you adjust the colour settings .
When the Hue & Sat dialogue box pops up ensure that you tick Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask
Then adjust the colour of your first layer of tinsel with the Hue & Sat options ensuiring you tick Colorize
These setting adjust the tinsel to a Blue colour I've increased the Lightness to compensate for the black brush, if I'd a chosen a White brush I would have lowered the Lightness. But you can see on the screen how the Hue & Sat layer is affecting your tinsel layer and you can adjust it all you want at any time.
Create Hue & Sat adjustment layers for the top two layers as described above varying the colour and lightness to suit. I find green and blue go well together so I'm going to add some green in there, but there is no limit to the colour combinations you can use to create your own personal tinsel banner.
This is the basic stage complete and now I shall hand the ball over to you to run with as you like. Using some Dodge and Burn variously splashed around the different layers will create hightlights and shadows. You might want to add a shadow layer for the tinsel directly below the other layers and if you have Eye Candy 4000 installed you might want to add some Chrome effect to the top-most layer to give it a sparkley appearance. Finally Unsharp Mask each layer according to your taste
This is my final image after playing about with the above mentioned effects.
I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial have a look at the others I have done.
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