Project 5: Karel Rasovsky

Text and shapes? Why not try to design a Christmas card. I started in color heaven – Kuler website - experimenting with the application and mixing my own themes. Finally, I decided to go with someone else’s palette, I believe it was called “Sprucing it up for Christmas”. Lovely combo of five colors: darkest green (2E5C32), middle green (328C4C), light green (9EB84F), yellow (F58442), red (C23B31).

After the dust settled, I only used three out of those in my composition, but it was nice to have choices throughout the project available. Kuler makes mixing sub-par, unprofessional-looking color schemes simply impossible. The single negative thing about this application is that one can spend entirely too much time on this beautiful website!

On with the composition, I challenged myself whether I could create a Christmas card with only shapes and text, plus a magic bag of Photoshop tools. First, I sketched out a silhouette of a Christmas tree, made out of garlands and stars. The garlands were created through custom shape tool, and subsequently reshaped via transformations (scaling, warping etc.) to forge a swirling shape and effect. Some subsequent layer aligning to make them look as if wrapped around a tree and we have a foundation. I then filled the imaginary tree silhouette with star shapes. The larger-sized stars were generated through a sequence of: path selection à transform (rotating) à duplicating the transform process. The transform/duplicate process left some room for improvement, to better align the stars along the garlands. I simply applied some edit/transform – scaling and warping to achieve just that. The rest was straightforward enough, as I simply filled the tree silhouette with randomly scattered and generated smaller-size stars – the Christmas tree was born. It was surprisingly simple, the results were better than expected. (The minus was that this generates a layer per each star shape, resulting in 40+ of them in my composition. Fortunately, layers are cheap in Photoshop…).

I placed the composition on the darkest-green background from my palette, and created a glow effect at the top of the three. A gradient mask layer on top of the background layer did the trick here. This is coming together nicely, but what to do with my tree top? Who would have thought that image of planet t Earth selected a couple of projects ago will come in handy again – it was the perfect fit. The theme was complete now – a star-spangled Christmas tree, with bluish Earth glowing at the top like a giant Christmas ball. Like in peace to us all on Earth.

I framed it with “Merry Christmas 2009” on top, this in my perennial favorite “Curlz MT” font family - it gives the headline a “merry” accent, without going over the top by employing other effects. My intention was to go with the “red” from my palette, but white stand out more prominently.

I proceeded to explore the rich text-formatting capabilities of Photoshop by dropping in the “The night before Christmas” poem. No kidding, Photoshop lets you do almost anything with text. And I needed most of it – leading to perfectly fit the long lines into a constrained space (the first line called for a special treatment), kerning to proportionately space out the title, the body of the poem and the closing line. Wow, this is what it must have felt like in the days of manual type-setting – total control! Blessed are we to live in an age when everyone can be the author, typesetter and a publisher, all in one – the era of Adobe applications!