Drawing snowflakes

For this year’s Christmas card, I used a portrait of our daughter as a background, on top of which I drew a winter motif in Photoshop. Initially, I looked for various card templates, but decided that it would be more personal (and more fun), to paint the picture by hand.

I sampled the colours from my daughter’s drawing in the photo and painted a snowy tree on a separate layer using various natural-looking brushes in my list of presets. I used a Wacom Intuos Pro Graphics Tablet, with the size and hardness of the brush linked to the pen pressure.

Then, on a separate layer, I drew the streaks made of snowflakes. To do this, I created a custom brush using a snowflake-shaped brush tip (I found a free set of simple snowflake-shaped brushes by doing a Google search) and adding the following dynamics:

• Scattering:
  • “scatter” setting of approximately 150% with “both axes” box checked – to make each brush stroke consist of individually-visible snowflakes;
  • “count jitter” setting of about 75%.
• Shape dynamics:
  • “size jitter” and “minimum diameter” settings of about 20%;
  • “angle jitter” of about 10% – so that the individual snowflakes would be slightly rotated within the single brushstroke.

When my daughter saw the final picture, she said that she drew it. In part she is right – I used elements of her doodles in the picture, which makes it special for me. I think about it as our first collaboration and hope that one day she would be up for drawing something together for real.