I have already read HTML Mastery and really enjoyed it, alright i’ll be honest here I downloaded the e-book illegaly (had to see what it was all about first right? :P).

Well I thought it was up to par with CSS Mastery so had to give my support and buy it, and i really need something new to read in the bath :D

Dont know anything about Bulletproof webdesign (2nd Edition) tho, havn’t read a sample chapter or even gone throught some reviews.

I picked it up by the design of the cover and the author ^^, that also inspired me a bit to a simple project and would be a good starting point to get into the RoR framework, I’ll see how that goes and will keep you updated on that at a later time.

I’ll probably end up buying some more next month so if you have any suggestions or recommendations feel free to let me know, spanks! :)

Alright lets start of by creating the “green grassy thingy” the flowers should be attached to.

Step 1. Create a new layer, select pencil tool and with a size of 1px randomly draw something along your canvas or design, something like this.

First we will add some blending effects to get rid of the flat look, see the result here. We then we duplicate the layer add a bit of gaussian blur, Filter -> blur -> Gaussian blur.

Go back to your original layer and lower the opacity to about 25-30% depending on the level of blur you have applied, this is to still have some definition (again it all depends on what feel you are going for).

Step 2. To speed things up we can use a custom shape from photoshop instead of freehanding it with the pen tool . The custom shape i’ve used is the star, draw it out on your canvas and select all the inner points (use the pen tool, hold down ctrl + shift to select all the path points) hit Ctrl + T and hold down alt + shift and drag one of the corners towards the middle, you should end up with something similar to this.

Next we want the corners to be round and not sharp as the stars original shape. Select the pen tool hold down your alt key and you would get the convert point tool , so click on your outer corner and drag untill you are happy and do so with all 5 corners and you should have a flower shape. Resize it to a more realistic size of your document then apply some basic blending effects to make it stand out.

Final step. This is really simple, take the ellipse tool hold down your alt key and draw an even circle to fit in the middle of your flower apply some blending effects and it should all be done.

A good thing is to have everything in layer sets so you can duplicate the flower and flip i, twist it and turn it however you want to make it more random.

This tutorial is based on verry simple photoshop tecniques and only takes 5 minutes to do but with good results. If you wanted to you could go crazy and do different types of flowers, colors add some leaves or whatever you feel would fit.

I also added a wallpaper with the re-use of one flower, enjoy

1280×1024 wallpaper