Heart of Bears for St.Valentine

In this tutorial we shall make a Valentine day card with the most popular motives of this day - a heart and a bear.

2. Go to Filter > Render > Lighting effects and add Soft Omni light to the center of the canvas.

3. Now add a Custom shape to the image. It will be a heart, obviously. We’ll only need it as a guide though and will delete it later.

4. Create a new layer on top of the shape layer.
5. At this point we need a bear. I took a white fluffy one. The cutout was made with one of the cutout plugins, because I wanted to preserve fluffy edges intact.

6. I copied the bear selection to a new layer and started making more copies of it. With Free Transform I variously scaled and rotated the bears and placed them one by one to fill the heart shape. Here you should see what layers should be up for a better look.

7. When the shape is filled add a layer style Drop Shadow to all the bear layers.

8. At this point we can delete the heart shape layer and merge all the bear layers (the quickest way to do it, as there are lots of these, is to make the background invisible and press Shift+Ctrl+E - Merge visible).
9. Now we’ll make a shadow for the whole heart. Copy the heart layer and staying at the lower layer go to Image > Adjustments > Threshhold.
10. Use Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur on the black shape and reduce the layer opacity. I also transformed the shadow a little.

11. To add text make active the background layer and add Type layer with the text of your choice.

12. I used the white and green pattern from the satin parts of the bear on the text. To define pattern select a square pice of the pattern with rectangular marquee tool and copy selection to a new file.

13. With the selected piece in the file go to Edit > Define Pattern.

14. To use the defined pattern of the text we should first rasterize the text layer (Layer > Rasterize).

15. Ctrl+Click the text layer icon to select the letters.

16. Go to Edit > Fill (Shift+F5) and choose the newly defined pattern.

17. Add Drop Shadow style to the text layer.

18. To make a final touch I made a cut-out of the bear bow, pasted it onto a new layer placed above the text layer, and placed after rotating in it’s place at the last letter.
19. You should add Drop shadow style to this layer too.