Blocks Tutorial

Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Tube of choice, mine is by Craig Wentworth and used with a license
Font(s) of choice, mine are Peinaud for the credits and Artifice SSK for the name
MuRa's Filter Meister Copies, the site to download has gone, if you cannot get a copy, please email me by clicking the link at the bottom of the page.
Preset Shape from pspforum.nl, here, unzip into preset shapes folder
You should have some working knowledge of PSP.

Open a blank canvas, 450x450px and floodfill with white.
Load your preset shapes and choose Div 39, create as vector and antialias checked. Line style solid, width 1, black, fill white. Start in a corner and drag the shape over your canvas until it almost fills it.

Add a dropshadow of V minus3, H minus3, Opacity 83, Blur 6.93
Take your magic wand, set to add or hold the shift key and click into every square.
Take your tube and copy it with shift+d and apply MuRa's Filter Meister Copies with these settings.

Right click/copy your MuRa'ed tube and right click/paste into selection into your squares. Select none. Duplicate this layer and pull it down and to the right, set the blendmode (in your layer palette) from normal to Hard Light. Merge visible, copy and paste your original tube as a new layer and place where you like it best, but leave room for the name. Apply the same dropshadow as above.

Now make your background layer active and duplicate it 3 times giving you four layers the same. Leave the original layer as it is, highlight the 1st copy and mirror it. Highlight the 2nd copy and mirror, then flip it. Highlight the 3rd copy and flip it. Resize all layers to about 400x400 px or a little less.

Make your tube layer active, choose a font and colour for your credits, create them as vector and only use fill, no stroke. Hide and unhide your background layers to make sure they don't obscure your credits. When you're done, hide the 4 background layers and merge the others visible. Make three duplicates of that layer and merge each one with a background layer. Make sure you always hide the newly merged layer!!

Make your top layer active, the bottom three can stay hidden for now.
Set your preset shape tool to rectangle, no stroke, fill white, create as vector. Draw a rectangle over the width of two columns of your background. Check if the other layers that you hid are all covered ;o) Convert to rasterlayer and set the opacity to 70.

If you want to save a template, you should do it now. Press Shift+d and save as blocks.pspimage in your templates folder.
Back to your original. Use two shades of the same colour from your tube for the name. The darker one as the stroke (foreground) set to 2 and the lighter one as fill (background). I set my font to 90, you have to work out what works best for your name and font. Create as vector. Image /rotate/free rotate/90 degrees left. Move it til you're happy, convert to raster layer and add the same drop shadow.

Selections/select all/float/defloat. Copy and paste the MuRa'ed tube as a new layer onto your name, when you're happy with the placement within the marching ants, go to selections/invert and hit the delete key on your keyboard. Selections/select none. Lower the opacity to 40.
Hide all the layers with your Background and tube and merge visible the white band with the name layers. Duplicate this 3 times and merge as you did with the tube and background layers.
Unhide all layers and save as a psp7 compatible pspfile in your creations folder, no need to name it especially.

Open Animation Shop, and use the animation wizard to open your psp file. I set my speed to 39. If you want to adjust yours go to edit/select all and then animation/frame properties and change the number. The higher the number the slower the animation. Play it, like it, save it ;o)

Here is another example, take it if you wish, just do not alter it in any way!!

This tutorial was created August 26, 2006 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.