MAKING YOUR OWN SPARKLES
Created October 23, 2004 © Copyright Moon's Designs
Property of Moon's Designs
This is my creation, any similarity to other tutorials on the
Internet is unintentional.
Please do not copy or place this tutorial or any graphics to any other
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This tutorial is written in and for PSP9 and assumes you have a working knowledge of PSP.
YOU WILL NEED:
Paint Shop Pro 9 (30 day free trial)
- You can get it HERE
Tools that we will be using in PSP9 are the Symmetric Shapes Tool, Grids, Layers, and Exporting to a Picture Tube.
My tutorials are only guidelines to help you accomplish a certain creation. Please feel free to be inventive and take whatever liberties you would like. I encourage each of you to do your "own thing" and make your creation yours! Your finished creation is yours to do with as you please. SAVE YOUR WORK OFTEN!
I think we have all downloaded sparkles from various tube sites, I know that I used to ~smiles~. I was never a big fan of the big airbrushed circle in back of the sparkle so I wrote a tutorial for PSP7 on how to make your own sparkles, if you would like to view that tutorial you can find it HERE. This tutorial, however, is not doable in PSP9 as they have changed the Perspective to be true perspective transformations.
One thing that PSP9 does have, that is not in previous versions of Paint Shop Pro, is the abilities to create our own Symmetric Shapes. I have received a few requests on how to make a sparkle in PSP9 and this tutorial is written for Cathy and Yolanda. I thank them to spurring me on create my first tutorial for PSP9 ~winks~.
In this tutorial we will not only be making our own sparkle, but a set of 4 sparkles and learning how we can export our creation as a tube.
Step 1:
Open a new image (file/new). 300x300, raster layer, black color.
I do this so you can see your sparkle as you create it. We will be deleting
this layer at the end of the tutorial.
Step 2:
Go to View/Change Grid, Guide & Snap Properties.
You will get a dialog box. Change the Current Image Positions to 150. This will give you 4 equal grids on your image after we activate our grid.
To activate your grid go to View/Grid.
You should now see this grid on your image. You can see how you have four identical spaces (quadrants) on your image. We will be making a sparkle in each of these grid areas.
Step 3:
On your Tools Toolbar, under your text icon, you will have your
different shapes tools. Click that on and select Symmetric Shape.
You will now have the following parameters that you can change on your Tools Option Palette.
Choose Draw Stellated for the mode, uncheck show nodes and create on vector, Number of Sides = 8 and Radius =8; Make sure that the round inner and round outer are unchecked. Have your Width set at 1.00.
Step 4:
Go to Layers/New Raster Layer, I named mine Sparkles. Remember
I said at the beginning we were going to be deleting the bottom layer.
We need to have our sparkles on a separate layer in order to do this.
Step 5:
To easily place your sparkles to be the same size in each quadrant,
you will want to go to View/Snap To Grid.
This will enable you to have perfect sparkles in each quadrant. I am going to be making 2 solid color sparkles and 2 sparkles that ave a colored edge.
Step 6:
The first sparkle I will be making is solid white. Go to your materials
palette and have your Foreground Material set at transparent and your
background material White color.
Step 7:
Starting in the upper left corner of quadrant 1, left click your mouse
and drag to the middle of the quadrant. You will see the outline of
your sparkle.
After you release your mouse, your sparkle will look like this.
Step 8:
I changed my foreground material to a purple color and left
my background material as the white color. Again, started in the upper
left corner of the 2nd quadrant I now had this.
I then made a gold and white star in the 3rd quadrant and a solid pink star in the last quadrant.
You can see how evenly they are spaced because we used the grids and snap to grid options in the view menu. This is a lot easier than trying to eyeball it. LOL. Now let's export our sparkles to a picture tube.
Step 9:
In order to export to a picture tube your image must be 24 bit and have
only one raster layer with a transparency. This is why we need to delete
the background layer. Go to your Layer Palette and click on the layer
that says Background. Go to Layers/Delete. You will receive this message,
"are you sure you want to delete the current layer?"
Say yes and your sparkles will be on a transparent layer. They sure don't look like much here, but once you place them on your image, as a picture tube, they will look fine.
Step 10:
Go to File/Export/Picture Tube. You will get a dialog box. In the Cell
arrangement change the cells across to 2 and the cells down to 2. I
left the placement options set at default and gave my tube a name. I
named it md-sparkles1 ~~ md for Moons Designs and added a number after
the sparkles in case I want to make more.
Step 11:
When you want to use your sparkles tubes go to your Picture Tubes tool,
on your tools palette, Click the drop down for your tubes and you will
find yours listed alphabetically. Now, my first tube is white so you
don't really see the tube on the white background, however, you do see
the name.
You can now apply your tube to your image. You will want to place them on separate layers in case you need to move them around.
I do hope this has helped you learn how to make your own sparkles in Paint Shop Pro 9.
If you have any problems, comments or questions please do not hesitate to E-mail me.
Tutorial written and created
by Patti Wavinak for Moon's Designs. These Tutorials are copyrighted
by law. You may LINK to them only. You may not remove any of the graphics,
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