Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Tube of choice, mine is by Jasmine Becket-Griffith and used with a CILM license
Font(s) of choice, mine are 2Peas Empire Dress, 2Peas Rain for the faded wording and Chell Chrome Bold for the name
Filters: Mura Meister Copies, VM Distortion and Eye Candy 5:Texture
and a Floatie animation

Open your tube and a new canvas, if you do a forum set 600x250, or 500x400 for a tag. Paste your tube into the canvas. Apply Mura Meister Copies with these settings.

And then Adjust/Blur/Radial Blur with these settings.

To this apply VM Distortion/Small Pox, use the Factory Settings.
Duplicate this layer, on the duplicate apply VM Distortion Tumbler, also with the Factory Settings.
Change the blend mode on this layer to Soft Light and merge visible.
Paste your tube and place it to one side, mine had a straight edge on both sides. To blend it with the background, select about one or two pixels wide of the straight edge with the selection tool set to rectangle. Selections/ Modify/ Feather, set to 31 and hit delete a few times on your keyboard until you like the result. Deselect. Add a dropshadow on a new layer (tick that option in the dropshadow dialog box), feather the shadow also. Merge the tube onto the shadow layer, crop merged opaque.

Activate your background layer, write out a fitting quote in a font that matches the feel of the tag. Place into the center and convert to raster layer.
Mura Meister Copies/ Tiling, use the Factory Setting but change the tile gap to 2. Apply a dropshadow and change the blend mode to overlay.
Duplicate your tube, mirror it and set the blend mode to multiply, on the bottom example I used screen. Change the opacity to about 80.

Make sure the top layer is active. Crop merged opaque. Selections/Select all/ Modify/ Selection Borders. Set to 10, both sides, antialias checked.
Duplicate the background layer, bring it to the top, invert the selection and hit delete on your keyboard.
Invert the selection again. Apply Effects/ Distortion Effects/ Wave with the below settings, then deselect. These settings work well with the forum set. You have to change them for the tag.

Add a dropshadow 3,3,59, 9.90 and again with -3,-3. Change the blend mode to Multiply, I used Luminance on the tag. Add all other text and the credits to the artist and yourself apart from the name. Merge visible.
Add your name in a fat font which you can animate. I used Chell Chrome bold, stroke black set to 2 and the fill another colour from your tube.
Now click into each filled letter part with your magic wand, tolerance and feather set to 0. Apply Eye Candy 5:Texture/ Reptile Skin. I chose Tiny Lizard in the settings, scroll all the way down. In Basic I changed the Colour to 'from original' and the size to 13.12. Deselect and apply a dropshadow. Click and Copy merged. Paste into AS as a New Animation.

Undo your last steps in PSP until you can apply the Reptile Skin again, hit the random seed button at the bottom. Deselect, add a dropshadow and in AS rightclick the first frame and paste after current frame. Repeat this one more time for 3 frames. Now you can add another little animation of you like.

Open your floatie animation in AS and check how many frames it has. Mine has 15. It would have to be a number that is divisable by 3. Because now you need to make as many frames from your tag.
On the tag Edit/ Select all. Right click/ Copy, left click onto the 3rd frame and paste after current frame. Now you have 6 frames. Move the slider to frame 6, activate it and paste after current for 9 frames and so on until you have the right number of frames.
Run the animation to check if it still runs smoothly, if it doesn't, you have the same two frames in a row somewhere, undo and try again.

Almost there. Edit/ Select all on both animations. Right click/ Copy the floatie and paste ito selected frame. You will only see the first picture. So make sure you take into account the entire size when you finally place it. You may have to undo and try again until you like it.
Finally on your floatie animation check the speed, it will say it under each frame with a D: in front. Change your tag to that speed, by going to Animation/ Frame Properties. Save as a gif.

If you need an avatar, make a duplicate of your tag in PSP and crop out a 150x150 square. Delete all unnessecary layers and frame it. Credit it, add your intial or name. I also pasted one frame from the floatie animation onto my initial, save as a jpg.

This tutorial was created 17th August 2010, 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.

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