Step 1 to making the bird, is isolating part of the star for the body.

Tail portion of body is lassoed off then duplicated to form tail. Some duplications are flipped horizontally for opposite side of tail.

Wing is made with same section as tail, with duplications merged together. Whole wing will then be duplicated for other side of bird.

Here the wings have been completed, and also have been reversed with curve of wings toward front of bird. Color changes will be made as work progresses with whole canvas by using hue/saturation and color/balance tools. Beak is brushed in and a little shadow is added with burn tool.

Wreath is formed with many of the stars after chopping the star carefully from the source. Many are rotated to give different angles to the points, and then overlapped until desired fullness is accomplished. Color changes will be made as work progresses, as with the birds.

Here the wreath shape has been distorted using the liquify warp tool to create a feather-like shape which is duplicated to make the tree. 'Branches' are rotated to different positions and scaled larger or smaller as needed to get tree shape. For beads, one of the crystals from the star is rounded off and duplicated. Sections are merged together in flowing shapes rather than straight pieces, and can then be used on wreath or tree as needed. Some color is added to merged beads with color/balance tool, then the hue/sat tool can be used to make further color changes.

Swags have been added on each side of the wreath. They are just wreath 'halves' which are rotated and moved to top. Beads will be placed on them as well as wreath, with some beads hanging down for birds to be holding with their beaks.

This shows the pieces of beading being used on the wreath.

Star has been added to tree top, and the pinkish/purple background layers are added. The background took much experimentation with gradient layers of different combinations, but I finally settled on a pastel background and made the contrast of the tree darker.

Many stars are duplicated and added both on tree and in background. Many of background stars are scaled to very small size. Some birds are also scaled small and added to tree as ornaments. They are colored with brighter colors using hue/sat tool, and little strings are brushed in to 'hand' the ornaments. Beads are all about the tree, and a string of beads are added for the birds to add to the tree.

I will include this step where I added 'curtains' of stars and beads, however, I decided they were just too much, so eliminated them for final canvas. Just want to show that many things are tried in the course of completing these projects. Sometimes, less is better.

In the course of making lots of changes, canvas was elongated to make tree taller, and base was liquify warped at bottom to go off the canvas. Last of all, some very light airbrushing gives some rays to the star.

Merged layers of final canvas have gold and blue filters added now at 25% opacity to help make the tree almost light up.