Christmas-Themed Template Customization Using Clipart (Exclusive Tutorial)

At Christmas everybody is rushing to buy gifts, decorate their homes, get a turkey. Web also designers have their share of work - decorating their site for visitors to feel the positive Christmas vibes and sense that you care enough about your business to update the site for major holidays.

In this tutorial I will show you how to adorn the template and make it look really festive.

So, let's go on templatemonster.com and take a look at this template, which is an online store. As Christmas is known to be a season of gifts, the first thing to be done is to change the empty inconspicuous cart for a colorful Santa with a heap of gifts. The header can be enlivened with Christmas tree ornaments, snowflakes and a touch of frost.

So, let's proceed step by step starting with the Santa-Clause. A suitable one can be found in free staff that the above-mentioned templatemonster offers, for example, or in picture storages like alamy.com. I liked this one best:



Open the image with Photoshop and drag the layer with Santa to the canvas with your template. Then replace the layer containing the cart with the Santa (hide the layer with card and move layer with Santa to it's place).



Looks somewhat unnatural; adding some shade wouldn't hurt. Change Santa's Blending Mode for Multiply. After that Ctrl+Click on the layer thumbnail and delete the selection in the layer containing the grey stripe (the background of Santa's head and the tree's top).

Add a new layer (under the one with the Santa) and using the soft brush put some grey shade under Santa's feet and the gifts. The Blur filter can be used for greater effect.



Now you need to turn the gifts back into the initial light color. Create a new layer between the shade and the Santa layer and outline the gifts with white using soft brush.



Now we can take to beautifying the header. There is plenty of free space between the name and the search, which can be used for embellishment. The white space is the ideal background for Christmas ornaments with a reflection. Using the already mentioned free staff search Ive come across a few good choices.



Add them to the header.


The star didnt seem fitting to me, so I decided to keep only the colored bulbs.


And finally we come to the most essential characteristic of winter - the snow. It will look fine in the top left-hand corner, the home of ornaments and the site name. Rummaging through the clip art I found the perfect snow for the site.

 

Add the snowflakes layers on top of all the other layers and set the Blending Mode to Multiply.

Arrange according to your taste:


And so, this is what I've got:


You can also download the .psd for this template (customization process only ;))

For more Christmas Tutorials please visit this page.