Okay folks, been asked how I went about producing the above image, so here's a quick overview. Please remember though that I'm no expert at all this layering and texturing malarkey.

In many ways I'm still a beginner and there are lots of folks on here much better at it than me, but I appreciate people asking how I did what I did, so here goes:

I began, as we all did this week in The Sunday Challenge by working with an image called Snowman Christmas, which was produced by UNKWinc over on Deviant Art.

First thing I did was to reprocess it using PaintShop Pro X2 to cool it down somewhat. To achieve this I converted it to Cyanotype and ran a couple of filters over it.

The snowflakes were actually a bit of art I created a few years ago in Microsoft Publisher. Basically, they were produced by simply typing with the asterisk key over and over. Once I had several dozen of the little blighters on screen they were made different sizes and moved around until I was happy with the overall layout. The finished piece was used on a Christmas card design I did, but I thought I could reuse them to good effect here.

The snowflake image was then added as a layer over the snowmen scene. I applied a little bit of distortion to it which I thought would make them look more random as if they were fluttering down from above.

Once merged, this new scene was converted into a sphere/circle as opposed to an orb. I then deleted the surrounding area so that the image solely comprised of the sphere on a transparent background.

Next, I sourced an image of a snowglobe off the internet, not to use the globe as this was going to be created using my new sphere, but to get a realistic base for it all to sit on. The snowglobe image already had a drop shadow and was on an almost white background. So the only work I had to do to it was to delete the actual snow globe and fill in the white background so that you couldn't see where I'd done the deleting.

Now I brought in the sphere I'd created and laid it over the image with the base. I then positioned it so that it looked like it was embedded into the base like a real snowglobe would sit. This was done by carefully deleting the lower section of the sphere.

Once I was happy with how that all looked I used the Balls and Bubbles feature on PSP to create what I hoped would give my sphere a realistic 3D feel. The tricky bit was getting it to be the right size so as to cover the snowmen sphere completely, that and messing with the surface texture etc. to make it look like slightly textured glass. I also added a little bit of white 'light' to try and make it look as though it was catching light from the same direction as the wooden base.

Then I created another layer and filled it using a texture supposed to imitate tin foil. By colouring this and reducing the transparency I hoped to make the background look icy rather than leaving it plain white.

All that remained to do was delete certain areas of this icy layer so that the snowglobe base and my sphere could show through. Once I'd done all that again it was a case of merging the layers and saving what I'd done.

I must admit I might have overlooked a few small tweaks here and there. However, this should give you enough of an idea as to how this image was produced so that anyone who hasn't done anything like this before can have a go at replicating it and making their very own snowglobe on ice.

If you do find this article of interest and decide to give it a go please post a copy of your snowglobe below - or add a link - as it would be good to see any that people out there might produce.

Best wishes

PAUL