Let’s begin by establishing our working environment-in other words, a background.  You may use mine; however, it’s relatively simple to create.  All that I did was to grab the Dodge Tool, set the 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 by adding some faded snow drops that should adjust the contrast as we apply white and lightish blue sprinkles of snow.  Select your Brush Tool with a Hard Round Tip the size of 5, and sprinkle little snow drops all around the center and a little around the background.  Make sure that you have your color preset set to white.  Now, set the the size to 1px and the 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 set up our base, let’s throw some sparkle to make it a little more vibrant.  Create a new layer and grab your Brush Tool again with a white color tip, 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, let’s add some darker and bigger snow drops.  So grab your Brush with a Hard Tip size of 15px, and make sure that its color is black.  Make a few black circles around the sparkles, and apply the following Layer Style Properties:

Results

Now, let’s 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 that 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, 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 greyish color and erase the top, whichever one you feel comfortable with.  Duplicate two or three of those white snowdrops, and resize them 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.

Thank you for reading once again and I hope that you enjoyed it!

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My banner now framed!