Today we are going to design a beautiful snowy sky that can be used for either a nice Christmas header or banner. This is a relatively simple tutorial but it brings out a nice beautiful result. In my belief, any beginner in Photoshop can work around the tutorial and achieve the same results.
Lets begin by establishing our working environment in other words a background. You may use mine however its relatively simple to create; all i did was grab the dodge tool and set exposure to 50% and went over the darkish blue color. It creates a nice effect that will help us further in the tutorial.
Now we will start with adding some faded snow drops that should adjust the contrast as we apply white and lightish blue sprinkles of snow afterwards. Select your Brush Tool with Hard Round Tip the size of five and sprinkle little snow drops all around the center and a little around the background. Make sure you have your color preset set to white. Now set the the size to one pixel and color to black, go over around the white dots a little, do not go crazy with it at least not yet. Once you have done that, set the Opacity level to 30%.
Now that we setup our base, lets throw some sparkle to make it a little more vibrant. Create a new layer and grab your Brush tool again with a white color tipping and sort of make some dust all around the shaded snow drops. After you have done the dusty sparkle, apply the following settings to your layer style properties in the Outer Glow feature
Results
As you can see, it seems like there is not enough sparkle so just duplicate the layer and spread it around a little. Now that you have done that, lets add some darker and bigger snow drops. So grab your Brush with Hard Tip size of 15px and make sure its color is black. Make a few black circles around the sparkles and apply the following Layer Style Properties:
Results
Now lets add our little bond between the stars. In order for you to create the lines, you will need to select your pen tool and set it to Paths, if you are not sure take a look at the image labeled on top with paths. Now decide which stars you want to connect together and create the paths. Once you have created the paths, make sure your Brush is set to Hardtip 1px and the color to #134469. Right click your path and select Stroke Path and then with Brush Tool. Once you have done that, you should have something like this:
Pen Path Settings
Results
Well you are almost done, now to actually create our artificially white snowdrops that are closer to the eye. So grab your Brush Tool again and create a new layer. Set the Hardtip to 16-17px and make a nice white circle. After that, either apply a gradient to it or duplicate it with a grayish color and erase the top. Which ever one you feel comfortable with. Duplicate two or three of those white snowdrops and resize them of to small and smaller. Spread them around and you should have something like this
You are done with your nice snowy/dreamy background. After playing around for a little, i decided to make it a little Merry Christmas Banner.
I think that even though the tutorial is relatively easy and simple, the outcome is satisfying and pleasing. If you have any questions or suggestions, either leave a comment or post a message at the forums.
Thank you for reading once again and i hope you enjoyed it!
My banner now framed!
More Tutorials: 
