Design a Vista styled wallpaper

Today we'll create a wallpaper in Vista style. A black background will be filled with stylish gradients decorated with blue and green abstract curved shapes. The techniques used in this tutorial are scalable. It's easy to turn the final design into different sizes to fit various monitors. Let's learn how to do it.

Step 1

Start a new screen sized document in Photoshop. In this case, I chose 1024px by 768px resolution so I can see the whole thing without scrolling. Fill the background with black color. Then pick the Polygonal Lasso Tool, and choose a part of the document. Then use the Gradient Tool to draw a gradient from white to transparent into new layer. Repeat this several times (always into new layer).

Step 2

To make the background less expressive, turn the Opacity down.

Step 3

Merge the layers together (Ctrl + E). Then blur them with the Gaussian Blur filter. A small preview of whole document follows.