Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Tube of choice, mine is by Renee Biertempfel and used with a CDO license
Font(s) of choice, mine is Allison ROB
Filters L en K's Andreas, DSB Flux Linear Transmission, Xero: Serious Fog, Tekstya, Porcelain, Nostalgia, AAA Frames, FotoFrame
Animation flash1 by Missy,
You should have some knowledge of working with layers for this.

Open a new canvas, 600x250 and your tube. Create a gradient from two light colours in your tube. Linear, Angle 0, Repeats 3. Floodfill your canvas. Duplicate this layer and apply L en K's Andreas at default. Change blend mode, I chose Lighten. Make a Custom Selection: Top 0, Left 200, Right 400 and Bottom 250.

Add a new raster layer, change your gradient to radial with two repeats, floodfill the selection and select none. Apply DSB Flux Linear Transmission with these values reading down, 6, 47, 50, horizontal. Select and delete the center section. Selections/ Select all/ Float/ Defloat and Invert. It will look like all of it is selected.

Paste your tube on one side, looking inwards, delete on your keyboard. Mirror the tube, copy and paste on the opposite side and delete again on your keyboard. Deselect. Add a slight dropshadow and change the blendmode, I chose Overlay.
Now paste your tube again in the center. Crop merged opaque.

Make a duplicate of the tube layer, blur/gaussian blur at 5. Apply Xero Serious Fog and Xero Tekstya, Change the blend mode, I chose Hue (L). On the original add a dropshadow and Xero Porcelain, blue channel to 0, and Xero Nostalgia.
Hide the two top layers, merge visible. Hide merged, unhide top two and merge visible. Unhide all. On both layers apply AAA Frames, Foto Frame: change width 8, stroke 86 and Opacity 59.

For the avatar make a copy of the tag, crop out a 150x150 square, merge visible and apply the frame. Add all necessary credits to both legibly. Add your name to both, save the avatar as jpg.

On the tag, copy the bottom layer over to AS. Open the animation, check the number of frames. Make the tag layer the same amount of frames. Edit/select all on both. Copy the animation and paste into selected frame on the tag. Run it. I needed a few goes to get it in the right place and it didn't copy over as a whole, dunno why though, lol. Now go back to PSP, hide the bottom layer and copy merged the other layers. Paste as a new animation and make the same number of frames. Copy over as you did the animation. Save as a gif.

If you want to keep the animated tag as a blank, don't copy over the name straight away, save the animation as a mng, then you can always add names to that.

My second example uses the art of Sara Butcher, who is also signed with CDO. I played around with the settings in my filters and used different blend modes. I also didn't add an animation as the tube pretty much covered the entire center. The font is Angelica.

My third example uses the art of Keith Garvey, who is signed with PTE. I played around with the settings in my filters and used different blend modes. The animation by circlesparkles by Missy. The font is Cream & Sugar.

This tutorial was created 11th June 2011, and is the sole property of ooh...babelicious. Similarity to other tutorials is purely coincidental. Do not copy this or any of my tutorials, or any part of my tutorials, to another site unless you have express permission from me to do so. If you want to share, send the URL, do not direct link or offer on your site. Give credit where credit is due. Do not script this tutorial and offer to others.

TutorialIndex