Making Mistletoe in Photoshop

I LOVE the holidays. The closer it gets to Christmas, the more excited I get. Thanksgiving is nice and it's great to get together with the family, but I'm already picturing all the lovely wrapped gifts I get to give and stomping through snow on my way to do it. Christmas lights and Christmas music and the way childrens' eyes light up as they drink it all in ... yup, it's easily my favorite time of year.

So, my thoughts turn to the holidays and I start looking at holiday-themed things I can make in Photoshop. Is there any symbol of the holidays that is more filled with emotion than mistletoe? I didn't think so, either. With that thought in mind, I just had to come up with a way to make it in Photoshop. What this tutorial leads you to create is something that can add holiday spice to your graphics, your Christmas photos, or just give you something to play with.

You'll need a copy of Photoshop (any version from 7.0 through the current CS2 will work fine, though this tutorial is written using CS2), and nothing else. It's easy, I promise - no plugins required.

Making Mistletoe

1. Open a new canvas (File, New) that is in RGB color with a white background and is sized at about 500 x 500 pixels.

2. Set your foreground color to dark green and grab your pen tool. You need to set it to "Paths" for this. Make a new layer (Layer, New, New Layer). Then, create a pair of two leaves that have points all around them (reference the illustration attached to this article). When you're finished with a leaf, right-click the path and choose "Fill Path". This will fill the path with the dark green - exactly what we want. Right-click it again and choose "Delete Path" and continue on to draw your second leaf.

3. Use your elliptical (circle) marquee tool to start selecting the inside "points" of your leaves. The goal here is to make the outside points remain pointy, but the inside points to turn into curves. Select one point at a time and hit the "backspace" key on your keyboard to remove the excess.

4. Now, set your foreground color to a bright, light green and use your pen tool again to create a highlight going up the center of your leaf.

5. It's time to add the berries. First, draw three deep red circles at the base of your leaves, covering up the bottom points. Then, use white to draw two circles on each berry for "shine".

Beautiful! Christmasy mistletoe ready for your use!