Today I’m going to walk you through the steps to create a StickyNote paper with realistic shadow using Photoshop CS3. This tutorial will work with any version of the Creative Suite too, you’re tools may be located slightly different however. I also have the Photoshop CS3 file for download at the end if you’d prefer to work on the original.

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I recently searched for a Polaroid Image template to use for a project and found a tutorial for creating a collage of Polaroid images from one stock image. This gave me an idea on how to integrate their idea within my design.

I quickly lost interest in the tutorial as it was overly complicated and spread across 5 pages with little visual aid. Having lost interest in their way of creating this effect, but still wanting to do the effect myself, I set about figuring out the fastest way of achieving the same result.

Below is the final result of my tutorial; click through after the jump to learn the process and download the final PSD file if you prefer that way.

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I know I’ve had to, many times create original music CD or video DVD cover art for one project or another.  Every time it seemed to be a different set of circumstances and I never had a template ready to go when I was laying in the shapes/graphics for the art.

Inevitably I would always whip out some music CD that was handy and grab a trust(worth)y ruler (picas, pixels, points and  inches oh my!) and measure out the size of the CD, then go into Illustrator and start laying in my guides, creating my ellipses (it’s a circle, stupid tool) and 10 minutes later I was finally ready to get to work!

Eventually I decided to save my template (wisely) to my always-with-me, never-leaves-my-side USB drive.  So no matter where I am, on which machine I’m on I have it ready to go – which has actually helped once when I was at the park with the ol’ laptop and my friend found me out of nowhere and wanted to talk “New Band Single” and just HAD to see a quick “idea” in the flesh so-to-speak.

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