This tutorial will show how we can create a sketchy wallpaper for Christmas this year! We shall cover watercoloring, pencil sketching and some simple lighting effects. It will be good if you are working with a pen and tablet.

Some of these fonts can be used on your web projects, but check the terms. And if you're looking at a quick overview of web font formats, check out Jonathan Snook's post on font embedding.
So, without further ad

 

Stock used

• Female model: http://angelcurioso.deviantart.com/art/dark-elegance-3-71561155
• Crow: http://stockmichelle.deviantart.com/art/Black-Crow-in-flight-101574139

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:
Ground texture
Water pattern image
Water splash brush

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1280px * 800px with black background. Load the Ground Texture stock image into Photoshop, and select a piece of the ground as shown below

 

Part 1: Creating The Main Text

  Taking a canvas size of 1900 X 1200. Of course you could pick any size according to your preference, but make sure the resolution is decent enough.

Fill the background layer BLACK.

With the Text Tool type whatever you want the text to be. I chose “Leave, but don’t leave me”, from a Pink Floyd song. “But don’t leave me” is coming later. Right now we’ll work on “Leave”. The font I have used is Futura Heavy.

1. Right-click on the text layer, go to Blending Options to create Layer styles.
2. On the Layer style box, go to Gradient Overlay, tick it.
3. On the Gradient Overlay, we open the Gradient editor and make the New Custom Gradient as above. I have chosen shades of black, white and grey so that we can easily modify the colors later.

 Tutorial Resources

• Blanched Paper Textures from WeGraphics
• Dancer from Shutterstock
• light_effects_custombrushes (ZIP, 26.1 MB)

Step 1: Set up the background

Let’s start the tutorial by creating a new document (Ctrl/Cmd + N) in Photoshop. Since I like printing my work, I will typically choose a large standard document size (like A4) and set the Resolution at 300 pixels/inch