Enchanted Forest

Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Tube of choice, mine is by Rachel Anderson
She is licensed through CILM and you can get her tubes there.
A stockphoto without restrictions, mine are from www.sxc.hu
You have to register, I just searched for 'forest' and 'winter' I think lol
Font of choice, mine is LainieDaySH
Xero, I got all 4 sets ;o) *is greedy*
Flaming Pear Designer Sextet
Alien Xenofex 2
You can download demos of Aetherize and Xenofex2.
You should have some knowledge of working with layers for this.

Open a new canvas 500x400px and floodfill white, add a new layer and selections/select all.
Now open your stockphoto, I saved mine from the enlarged version and resized it 50%, copy & paste the photo into the selection. Selections/ select none.
Apply filter xero porcelain, I used the factory settings.Then I applied Flaming Pear Aetherize, again the default setting.

Copy and paste your tube onto your forest scene, resize and place, so it looks like the character is in the forest...
I added a dropshadow of V 0, H 3, Opacity 64 and Blur 4.95. Next I went to image/picture frame and chose one with a ragged edge, fit to canvas, outside the image. Merge visible and resize all layers to 90%. Sharpness/unsharp mask with these settings.

Add credits to the artist and yourself and merge visible. Duplicate this twice, make the bottom layer active and x out the other 2. Take your magic wand, tolerance set to 4, feather 0, and click all over your forest. Make sure the blobs don't become too huge, if they do, undo and click somewhere else. Apply Xenofex 2 Constellation with the settings in the screenshot below. Apply constellation to other two layers, click Random Seed for each to change the placement of the sparklies. Deselect.

I then added the word Enchanted as vector, pick to colours from your tube for the stroke and fill, set stroke to 1. Convert to raster layer in your layer palette and set the Blend mode to Luminance(L), again I duplicated the layer twice. Hide layers, leave the bottom ones of each layer unhidden. Save as pspfile now if you wish to keep a template. Add your name, I applied the same dropshadow as to the tube and set the blend mode to Hard Light. Duplicate the name twice and apply constellation with the same settings you used for the forest. Hide the top two layers of your name as well. From the bottom merge the 1st, 4th and 7th layer visible. Hide that layer. Again, from the bottom unhide and merge 2, 3 and 5 visible. Hide the newly merged layer. Merge the last 3 layers visible and unhide all 3 layers. Save as psp7 compatible psp file in your creations folder.

Open Animation shop and open your file with the animation wizard, I set the animation speed of mine to 15. Play it, like it, save it ;o)

Here is another example with a wintery theme.

This tutorial was created August 30, 2006 (redone with another artist on December 28, 2007) 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.