Versatile Popcorn - Birthday Invitation

1. Start with the paintbrush. Choose a large round brush with a hard edge to create the initial shape of the popped corn. It is also important to choose a pale but bright shade of yellow if you want it to be butter or blue if you want it to be plain. Paint in a general shape. I found it was easier to use the brush as a spot than to drag it around trying to create the bulbous bits at the open end. It allowed for layering creating a more convincing pattern.

2. Burn tool with a small, feathered edge with a mid-tone range and 13% exposure is used to create depth. Butter would sink into the crevices of the popped corn so that is where I burned. Around each of the bulbous bits at the opening. To give the best depth it is important to mark the crevice between the top ball of the kernel and the bulbs on the bottom. It should bleed out as well, darkest in the deepest part of the crevice and fading a little as it moves in either direction away from this area.

3. For my invitations I next added a text layer. I discovered it was best to break the copy into three layers and thereby create three pieces of corn to get all of the information to be legible. (Hint: If you have illustrator you can copy or place the popped corn into a new document where you can set and manipulate type easier and cleaner than in Photoshop. Or, you can set type in illustrator, create outlines, and move it into Photoshop.)

4. Creating the ticket: On a new layer use the marquee tool to select a rectangle and fill it with the color of your choice.

5. Trick to finding center of a layer/object, choose the scale option (edit - transform - scale) and it will show you a bounding box with center and corner points. While the bounding box is displayed you can move guides in.

6. With the guides in place choose the eraser tool and a brush size appropriate for your ticket. Place the eraser on the guides at either side of the ticket and erase a half circle.

7. With the marquee tool choose an area inside your ticket equidistant from the edges. To create the inner rectangle choose stroke from the edit menu. This will give you a dialog box to choose the color and thickness of the line you need. It will also allow you to choose its location, inside the selected area, outside the selected area or directly on the selection line. Repeat this for step for the inside rectangle.

8. Choose the text tool and add copy as before. I personalized the tickets for each child.

9. Merge each text layer with its image layer.

10. To get everything on one page per invitation choose image-canvas size. In the dialogue box change the width of the canvas to 8" and the length to 10". This will allow you enough room around the edges for area your printer may not be able to print in.

11. Choose each layer individually and arrange them and scale them so they are all visible on the canvas at the same time. Note: if you choose to personalize each ticket you should make the ticket you are placing in this step with a blank space for the child's name. Once you have them all positioned you can flatten the image. Now you can print each invitation and write in the name after the fact by hand or you can add a new layer with each child's name and print each time.

12. I used a heavy weight white cardstock and cut out each popped corn and the ticket. A pre-printed popcorn bag from a local craft store served as the envelope, I slid each of the three corn kernels into the bag while it was still flat and used double sided tape to put adhere the ticket with each child's name on the outside of the bag.

Bonus: Create an empty layer behind a duplicate popcorn layer. Choose a medium hard-edged brush and a warm brown tone. Using the shift key to constrain your lines draw a 'v' shape starting and ending behind the kernel. Brush in the center with the same color. Because it is on the layer behind the duplicate of the popped corn it will create the appearance of the ice cream over hanging the cone. Using either the burn tool (my choice in this example) or a solid brush add cross hatch to the cone. I used the burn because I like the way it fades out from the middle and creates shadow.