Winter Opal

Gather 'round my precious Tigerlilies, I have a new tut for you! I did this tut on November 29 using PSP9 and Animation Shop. Any resemblance to existing tuts is a coincidence.

OK, here is what you will need:

A tube - I am using Augustina by Verymany. You need a license to use her beautiful work. You can find everything you need at www.verymanytubes.com 

A kit - I am using Cheer by Tiny Turtle Designs at www.tinyturtledesigns.com 

Now, these are PTU items. If you have existing items that you wish to use, go right ahead. Sometimes it's really fun to just do your thing and make the tuts your own. I hope you will show me what all you do! I love seeing what people do with the tuts. 

Just follow your heart and have fun!

Next you will want a mask of your choice.

Choose two fonts. I picked Sunshine Blvd and Quantify which I got at www.dafont.com You will want the fonts to be different - such as one block and one script.

The filters I used are Flaming Pear Lacquer and Flaming Pear SuperBladePro. You can substitute if you want. I am old and I got these as freebies to try many years ago and I loved them and I will probably die still using them.

OK, so let's begin. Open a 650 X 650 canvas

Floodfill with Paper 31 from the Cheer kit.

New Raster Layer. Floodfill with white.

Apply your mask.

Return to bottom layer.

Layer Properties.

Set Opacity at 87.

Merge all.

My tube is kind of weird so in order to make sure I place everything right, I want to place my tube next. I resized her to 60% and Pasted As New Layer and I placed her where I wanted and added a drop shadow. 

Element 77 - resize 60% drop shadow

Element 76 - resize 60% crop and erase as needed. 

                      Add Noise 41

                      Lacquer

                      Duplicate Layer

                      Mirror

                      Drop Shadow

Element 10 - Free Rotate 25% Left

                      Resize 80%

                      Apply Lacquer and play with it until it looks sort of like a golden opal. Each person's                            PSP settings are going to be different. 

                      Apply drop shadow

                       Duplicate the layer and mirror. Arrange where you want it.

Element 8 - resize 20% Paste and drop shadow

Element 68 - mirror resize 20% drop shadow

Element 20 - resize 20% paste and drop shadow

Element 44 - resize 20% paste and drop shadow

Depending on how your tube is, you may wish to arrange all your stuff differently than I did mine. You may want to duplicate more elements or delete some and add others from the kit. Go ahead! Make it your own! 

When you have everything how you like it, merge all your layers, go to Adjust, then select Sharpen, and add your credits.

Next, we are going to do the Winter Opal Word Art.

I would advise saving your work at this point because if anything crazy happens, you have a blank copy.

Open a new canvas I use a bigger one than what I need because I like having room.

Choose the font that you want to use for the Winter.  Since I generally work larger because I find it easier to use a larger size and then resize it to fit into my picture, I generally go with 48. Type the word winter. I used the SuperBladePro filter with the Aqualite setting and it gave me this coppery effect that totally looked like it belonged with my tube. I added a drop shadow and resized it to 60$ and then sharpened it and added it to my picture.

Then for the word Opal, I used my Sunshine Blvd font. I used Lacquer for the filter. When I placed it - after resizing to 60%, instead of a drop shadow, I used Add Noise at 41 and I used Eye Candy's Corona filter with a color chosen from the tube. It caused the word to look like an opal. If you do not have Eye Candy, you can use Drop Shadow which came with PSP and you can change the color and switch the Vertical offset to 3 and the horizontal to 1 to get the same effect.

Sharpen when you are satisfied.

If you do not wish to animate your tag, you are finished. I hope you had a good time.

Please show me what you did.

Open Animation Shop.

Go back to PSP.

Choose your Freehand Selection tool and draw around what you want to become glittery. As I said, I like to make my areas extra big. Go to View, then Choose Zoom and Zoom In. Or you can use your mouse's roller button to make the image bigger. Sometimes people like the menu and sometimes people like the mouse. 

When you have circled all your areas, zoom back to 100%.

You should have marching ants around all your choices. 

Go to Window and then Choose Duplicate. Select Duplicate two times so that you have three pictures.

For your first picture, go to Adjust, choose Add Noise. I like Gausian Monochrome for this one. I also like a lower number. 50 for this one. Then Sharpen. Then Select None so the Marching Ants go away. Copy this. Take it over to Animation Shop and Past as New Animation.

Back to PSP. Minimize the first picture.

Go to the second picture. Add noise, but this time increase it to 55. Here is a little trick. You don't want to increase your noise by too much. That is why sometimes noise looks blurry. Never increase greater than 5. And always sharpen every time you add noise or resize. It will keep those little nasty gremlins from coming when you optimize your animation. 

Sharpen and Select None.

Copy and Carry over to Animation Shop, but this time you will Paste After Current Frame.

Back to PSP. Minimize the second picture.

Add Noise increased to 60. Sharpen. Select None.

Carry over to Animation Shop.

Paste After Current Frame.

Now one thing I always do before I do anything else is I go to Animation and View. I want to look for any problems with animation and I want to make sure everything is smooth and did everything look like how I imagined it would. Once I am satisfied, I save a copy as an MNG file. This is a non-optimized copy. If you want to add a name or an element you would use the MNG. If you keep optimizing a GIF you get gremlins. Nobody likes gremlins.

When you are sure you are satisfied and you are ready to offer this as I am right now, then you save as a GIF and you can share with your friends! I hope you had fun!