Valentine’s Day is coming and nothing says “I love you” quite like those awful tasting candy hearts in powdery, pastel colors. So let’s make some!
Start with a new document. I’m making mine 430×200px because I want to make a variety of hearts.
Create a new layer and grab your pen tool. Turn on the grid (Ctrl+J so that you have a guide to draw by. Using your pen tool, carefully draw out your heart shape. Don’t worry; it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s better if it’s not perfect. That’s why we’re not using the “heart” shape that comes with Photoshop. These things are made out of sugar, after all.
Once your heart is outlined, you can hide the grid.
Now Ctrl+Click on the heart path in the paths palette to load its selection and fill it with your choice of sickening pastel colors. I’m using #fff799).
Now apply the following Layer Styles to y our heart. Note that depending on the size of your heart, you may need to adjust the bevel width.
Great. Your heart should now be starting to have a little depth and texture, like so.
We’re not done yet, though. Now Ctrl+Click on the heart layer’s icon in the Layers palette to load its selection and create a new layer under it, between it and the background. Using your eyedropper tool, sample the color from the very top left of the yeart, then hit X to reverse the foreground and background colors and sample the very bottom right of the heart. You should then have a dark color as your foreground and the lighter one as your background. Hit X again.
In my case, the colors are #fffab5 and #c9b71c.
Now click the eye beside the heart layer in the Layers palette to hide it and fill the selection with a light to dark gradient at an angle matching the hidden hearts.
Keeping the selection active, hit Ctrl+Alt+Right Arrow Key followed by Ctrl+Alt+Down Arrow Key. Repeat both combinations a few times, until you’ve successfully distended the heart down and to the right a few pixels.
Now, un-hide the heart layer. Make the heart layer active and then hit Ctrl+E to merge it with the layer below.
Now we just need to do the text. Grab a nice, blocky serif font (I’m using Coper Std) and set the foreground color to a dark pink, like #ec0080. Enter the text for your heart. Make it center aligned, all caps and center it atop the candy. Increase the kerning to about 25 and decrease the leading to about 2pt smaller than the font size.
There’s just one problem. That text is too clean. Go to Layer – Rasterize – Type to convert the text to a bitmap. Now go to Filter – Blur – Gaussian Blur and enter an amount of 0.5.
We’re almost done, just one more step. To give the impression that the text was stamped onto the heart, we’re going to give it a very, very slight outer bevel, like so.
And that finishes up your candy heart!