Although I’ve had quite a lot of requests, I’ve never really given a fair shot at writing up a tutorial/case study before. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t see myself as the teacher type or that I hate trying to write about what I’ve made. When creating my December calendar wallpaper, I thought it would be a great candidate to at least give it a shot once. So, let me try and break down how it came to be…

I started with a stock photo of a winter house on a blank white canvas. I deleted a light post, some trees and extended some of the snow.

I then removed all the signs from the house and barn.

After the buildings were cleaned up, I added in extra windows, candles in windows, wreath on the barn and misc clean up. I also extended some of the roof lines give it a more hand drawn look.

Next came color correction and scratch/grunge elements as well as cleaning up the road a bit.

Textures next: added trees to the background so it wasn’t against a stark white background. Also added in some misc paint splatters and texture to add some depth

Continued with more color adjustments, grunge elements and splatters.

Lastly, adding in the calendar/date components to complete the calendar variant.