Recently I created a Valentine's Day project for the Craftaholics Anonymous design team, which was a gift or decor box. As usual, I added this to my "What's New" image slider on my SVG cut file store. I needed a background for this slider that kept the Valentine theme. So I decided to make a heart brush in Photoshop® to create a tumbling hearts background.

1. The first step was to draw the heart shape in a 400 x 400 pixel blank canvas. The color didn't matter because we would be setting the color in the brush settings. I wanted a traditional heart shape so I just used Photoshop's Heart Card custom shape.
   
   
2. To set this shape as a brush, click Edit - Define Brush Preset. Give the brush a name. Now it will be in the Brush and Brush Presets menus.
   
   
3. Now that we have our brush, we are ready to create the background. The slider image dimensions are 900 x 355 pixels. So we will create a new empty canvas document and let's fill the bottom layer with white. Let's set the brush size to 45 pixels.
   
   
4. Next, we place the product photo and logo in place. Now we can see the empty areas of the image.
   
   
5. We will create several layers of tumbling hearts, one for each color. We could use the brush's Color Dynamics parameter to automatically change the color of the hearts with each brush stroke but using layers gives us more control over the color and opacity for each individual layer. We want these hearts to be semi transparent so that you can see both when they overlap.
   
   
6. Next, let's add a new layer and use the eyedropper tool set the color for the heart brush to the dark red color in the product photo.
   
   
7. With the Brush tool selected, set the Brush tool to our custom brush in the Brush pane. Let's add a few parameters.
   
   
8. We want the hearts to be spaced loosely over the image as we paint, so let's increase the Spacing to about 300%.
   
   
9. We also want to vary the size of the hearts, so let's set the Size Jitter to 75% in the Shape Dynamics pane. To make the hearts look like they are tumbling, we will set the Angle Jitter to 60% and the Roundness Jitter to 70%.
   
   
10. Now we can paint a few hearts into the image and set the layer opacity to 30%, which gives us a few tumbling pink hearts.
    
    
11. Add a new layer and paint again. Let' s change the color of these hearts by applying a gradient to the layer. First we will set the Foreground and Background colors to a dark and light peach color. Double-click on the layer and choose Gradient Overlay. Set the Gradient to Foreground to Background. Set the layer's Opacity to 40%.
    
    
12. Repeat this twice with a gradient of light and dark blue and green colors. I decided to keep this last layer's Opacity at 100%.
    
    
13. The last step is to add the name of the SVG cut file and we have a finished slider image for our web store.
    
    

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