In this tutorial I will show you how to celebrate the new year by creating a 2010 sparkler text wallpaper.

First start a new document at whatever screen size you use, I am just going to make a 1024X768px with a black background.

Next pick some font you want to use, I used one called Van Dijk that I already have in a font pack. Put it on your canvas in a new layer.

Then I will add some outer glow to the font

Then I found these sparkler images on a stock photo site:

Now copy and paste spark 2 and 3 in the document and duplicate them and place them around your letters similar to this

Now take spark1, put it in the document except make the layers behind the text. Shrink the spark1 picture pretty small and move it along the path of the first number 2. Change its blending mode to “screen”.

Now continue on around the letter with the same spark.

Once I got finished with that I had around 6 different layers just for the “2″.

Continue doing that same thing with the other numbers.

Then I added spark 3 in a couple spots to have a few bigger sparks

That is the main effect I wanted to go for in this tutorial but it seems a little to plain to me so I will add a few more things to the image. You could stop here if you want because I think that looks good as is.

The next step I am just going to add a ball of light with lighting coming off of it that touches the text.

First I made this ball in a new layer with my ellipse shape tool and added the same outer glow as we had on our text.

Now behind that layer copy and paste spark2 all the way around the circle.

I want to make this look more like a new years ball that drops so I searched for “new years ball” on a search engine’s image search and found this

Drag that into your canvas and set its blending mode to multiply.

Erase the black parts you can still see on the edges

For the final touch put a circle behind the ball/spark layers kind of a mid to light orange color.

Add some gaussian blur to it. After that I added a white circle and added more gaussian blur to it.

That is it, you could stop before making the glows and it still looks good too.

Happy 2010! Hope you learned something from this simple tutorial!