Create an Explosive Flaming Poker Card in Photoshop

In this tutorial I will show you how to create your own custom poker card from scratch by using the wide variety of shapes that come with Photoshop. I will also show you techniques on how to manipulate fire by using simple methods.

Create an Explosive Flaming Poker Card Photoshop Tutorial

Resources

Step 1

Open up Photoshop and create a new document of 1680x1050 and click OK. As a start, we will need to fill the background with a grey colour #606060 so that all details of the flames will be visible once we are going to edit them.

Step 2

Create a new layer and name it Poker_card_base. We are going to create the poker card base by using the Rounded Rectangle Tool (U). We need a Shape Layer as it needs to be fully editable when we are going to edit the card shape itself. Set the Radius, located at the top menu, at 40px and drag the regular card shape.

Step 3

Time for some creative freedom! You are going to create your own poker card with custom Shapes. With the Custom Shape Tool (U)selected, you will notice that there is a small arrow located to the right of the default Shape. Click on that and it will open the Custom Shapes Picker menu, try to find the spades shape.

You will automatically create a new Shape Layer when you drag the tool from the upper left corner. Make the spades symbol as large as you want but use a dark grey colour (#3b3b3b). I want the symbol to show on each corner so we will need to duplicate this Shape by selecting it with the Path Selection tool (A)and pressCtrl+C and Ctrl+V and drag it to the right corner. Select and copy the two spade shapes again en drag them towards the bottom of the card and flip them by pressing Ctrl+T and rotate these layers 180 degrees. You should have this result at this point of the tutorial.

Step 4

Download this Paper Texture by Suzanne Clute and open it up in Photoshop and drag it into our working canvas. Place the texture below the Spades_symbols layer. Press Ctrl+T and make the texture smaller so that it fits the card, make sure you overlap the texture by a few pixels. Note: I have lowered the opacity of the texture on the left for better viewing. In the Layer Menu, right-click on the texture layer and selectCreate Clipping Mask.

As you can see the texture will be wrapped around the poker card base. The texture has a soft pink tone which I want to get rid of by using a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer which you can create by clicking on the Create New Fill/Adjustments Layer icon located on the bottom of the Layer Menu. Set the Saturation to -45 to saturate the color a little bit.

The card looks better but could still use some improvements. Go to Filter>Lens Correction or press Shift+Ctrl+R to create some vignetting. Click on the Custom tab on located at the top right and go to the Vignette section and set the Amount to -70 and the Midpoint to 0.

Step 5

Photoshop comes with a set of custom shapes we can use for this tutorial. Find the Fleur-de-Lis shape (shown below), create a new Shape Layer and with the dark grey colour #3b3b3b

Step 6

You can go as crazy as you want with your own custom poker card with the wide variety of shapes. At this point of the tutorial I have added a few ornaments to break away from the generic poker card image but still keep it simple. As you may have noticed, I have also reduced the size of the Fleur-de-Lis.