Creating an Ecological Fairy Tale Wallpaper

This tutorial will show how to create pebbles covering with grasses from scratch in Photoshop. You shall display your own creativity on what things should be placed on them to form your own ecological wallpaper!

Preview of Final Image

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Create a document with size 1200×800 pixels. Fill the background with a linear top-down gradient with color from #CCCCCC to #FFFFFF.

Select the Pen tool, set it to Shape Layers mode at the top menu and draw a simple shape for the pebble that you want it to be. You can fill the shape with any color for now.

Repeat the same process for more pebbles. The placings is all up to your creativity. There is no rules on how to do this step.

Now find a Sand Texture to your personal liking, otherwise you can download the one I used here from Texturise.com. Position the texture so that it covers the whole pebble. Right-click on the pebble layer to load its selection, then click on the Add Vector Mask button. This way, you will get the sand texture masked within the shape. Hide your pebble layer for now.

Repeat the same process for the grass texture. You can download the one I am using here, made from FrozenStocks. Select the grass layer and go to Filter > Sharpen > Sharpen to bring out more details.

Select the Brush tool open up the Brush Preset Picker panel. Look for the brush named Chalk 60 pixels. Set the Foreground Color to #000000. Now click on the black and white mask on the Grass layer and start paint around the border of the pebble shape. This is to make the border less regular like those tips of grasses. Remember the black is used for opaque areas, if you want to unhide the transparent areas, use white color.

When you are done with the border, apply a Drop Shadow layer style to the grass. Set the angle to 90 degrees. This is roughly what you will get. Let us now work on the sand texture.

Create a new layer in between the Sand and Grasses layers. Name this layer as Tones and set its Blend Mode to Soft Light. Using the Paint Brush tool (in Soft-Rounded mode) with size around 100px and color #000000, paint around the bottom area of the pebble. You will get a soft shadow there.

Repeat this process a few more times, considering the light source coming from top left.

Unhide the earlier pebble shape layer you drawn. Right-click on the layer and choose Rasterize. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the Radius to 5 pixels then the layer Opacity to 40%. Select Edit > Free Transform and scale it vertically downwards as shown in the diagram below. Hit OK once you are done.

You have the basic shadow for your pebble already but we also need to enhance the shadow where the pebble is actually touching the floor.

Zoom in so we can get a better view. Using the black paint brush with a smaller size this time, paint at the part where you want the pebble to touch the floor.

And there you have your first pebble! Make more pebbles in various shapes and sizes to fill up the document.

Now you have several empty lands to fill things with. There are many stuffs that you can do with them, it all depends on your preferences and imagination. I want to make it more fantasy-like and there is a beautiful stock gallery provided by Shoofly Stock. The high quality items inside is able to fill up your pebbles in a variety of themes.

I start off with filling in the trees and plants.

Then I made a layer below them and paint in shadows using the Soft-Rounded Paint Brush tool.

This is an overview of how it is like after filling in the greens. Remember to leave spaces for theme objects.

Lastly, I inserted a few fantasy-themed objects like the shoe house, walking tree and stone hut.

That is all and I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. Thank you. Download high-resolution wallpaper here.