Paint Shop Pro V8

Graphic of your choice.

A gold fill or gradient of your choice.

VM Natural

If you have everything you need, lets begin.

1. Open your graphic of choice. A graphic that is a bit wider than longer will work best.

2. Duplicate by hitting Shift + D. Close the original.

3. With your eye dropper chose a light and dark colour for your foreground and background.

4. Image, add border, and add a 2 pixel white border (or light grey if white is near the ends of your graphic).

5. Select the border with your magic wand, and flood fill with a gold gradient of choice.

6. Effects, 3D Effects, Drop shadow and use the following settings:-
   • Vertical & Horizontal:     4
     
   • Opacity:     85
     
   • Blur:     15
     
   • Color:     Black

7. Repeat drop shadow but change the vertical & horizontal to –4 (minus)

8. Deselect.

9. Image, add border and add a 2 pixel border using your lightest colour.

10. Image, add border and add a 2 pixel border using your darkest colour.

11. Image, add border and add a 5 pixel white border. Select the white border with your magic wand, and again flood fill with the gold gradient.

12. Deselect.

13. Repeat the above steps, but this time add a 10 pixel white border and flood fill with your gold gradient.

14. Deselect.

15. Repeat the above steps again until the white border.

16. In your colour palette, change your foreground to pattern. Click on the drop down menu, and you will see the framed image listed there. Click on this and change the angle to 45 and scale to 100.

17. Image, add border and add a 25 pixel white border.

18. With your magic wand, click on the white border. Flood fill with the pattern.

19. Deselect.

20. Image, add border and add a 2 pixel white border (or light grey if white is somewhere on the outside of your graphic). Select the border with your magic wand and flood fill with the gold gradient.

21. Effects, 3D Effects, Drop shadow and use the same settings as before. Repeating with the minus settings.

22. Image, add border and add a 2 pixel border using your lightest colour.

23. Image, add border and add a 2 pixel border using your darkest colour.

24. Image, add border and add a 5 pixel white border. Again, select this border with your magic wand and flood fill with your gold gradient.

25. Deselect.

26. Image, resize to around the 350 pixels in length.

27. Adjust, Sharpness, sharpen.

28. Open a new transparent image, 900 x 600. This gives us plenty of room to move.

29. Go back to our framed image and edit, copy.

30. Now back to our transparent image, edit paste as new layer.

31. In your layer palette, duplicate this layer 2 times. You now have four layers.

32. Click on layer 2 in your layer palette and go to image, rotate, free rotate and rotate 45 degrees to the right, all layers Unchecked.

33. Click on copy of raster 2, and go to image, rotate, free rotate and rotate 45 degrees to the left, all layers Unchecked.

34. Merge visible layers.

35. Duplicate this layer. Image, resize and resize by 50%, all layers Unchecked.

36. With your mover tool, move the smaller graphic over to the left and position is as shown here.

    

37. Duplicate this layer, image, mirror.

38. Merge visible.

39. Effects, 3D Effects, drop shadow and add the following drop shadow.
    • Vertical:     4
      
    • Horizontal:     6
      
    • Opacity:     65
      
    • Blur:     10
      
    • Color:     Black

40. Edit copy. Edit paste as new image. This will get rid of the excessive transparency.

41. Add a new layer. Layers arrange send to bottom. Chosing a nice light colour from your graphic, flood fill the new layer.

42. Effects, plugins, VM Natural, sparkles and apply the default settings.

43. Add a new layer for your watermark.

44. Merge all, flatten.

45. Open a new 350 x 350 transparent image and flood fill with the same background colour. Add the same VM Natural sparkles as before. Merge all, flatten and save as background.

46. You can now take this into letter creator.

    
    
    © An Aushorty Creation – August 2004