Shamrock Wishes

Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Tube of choice, mine is by Barbara Jensen
I colourised mine to match the theme, you must seek permission to colourise art, not all artists allow it.
A shamrock, you can use mine, just don't claim it to be yours.
I made it following this tutorial.
A preset shape, mine is from a collection called mcHT_Shapes01. Put it in your preset shapes folder.
Font of choice
Filters Alien Xenofex 2. You can download a demo of Xenofex2.
You should have some knowledge of working with layers for this.

Open your tube and duplicate it, resize the canvas to about 20 pixels higher, and width of 500px. Pick a dark colour from your tube as the background, foreground set to nil. Click on your preset shapes and find Shape-3. Draw the shape out as a vector, same height as your canvas, see my example for the width. Move the shape to the left of your canvas and convert to rasterlayer.
Take your magic wand (feather and tolerance set to 0, mode add), click into the 3 ovals, go to selections/modify and expand by 2. Add a new raster layer and drag it below your shape layer, fill with a light colour from your tube. Go to Effects/ Texture Effects/ Straw Wall with these settings. Deselect.

Go to the shape layer and go to Effects/ Artistic Effects/ Colored Foil with these settings.

Hide your white layer and the tube layer, merge the shape and ovals visible. Add a dropshadow of V -2, H 2, Opacity 56, Blur 5, black. Add the same dropshadow to your tube. Now open your shamrock and copy/ paste it onto your canvas. Rotate it 46% left, and add dropshadow of V -1, H 1, Opacity 44, Blur 3, black. Copy the layer, resize to 75% and mirror, set the blendmode in the layerpalette to darken. Arrange both in the top oval.

I then made a copy of the tube layer and lowered the opacity to 28, I placed it to the left of the tube and down a wee bit. Drag this layer below the original tube layer.
If you want your tag smaller, resize it now, make sure all layers are checked.
Write out a matching verse, and place it in the middle oval. Add credits to the artist and yourself. Hide the white layer, and crop the tag merged opaque. Unhide the white, hide the big shamrock, and merge visible.
Duplicate the shamrock twice and apply Xenofex 2 Constellation with the settings in the screenshot below. Apply constellation to the other two shamrock layers, click Random Seed for each to change the placement of the sparklies.

Save as pspfile now if you wish to keep a template. Hit shift+D and work on that now. You can close the template.
Click on the merged layer and add your name as a vector, fit it into the 3rd oval and convert to raster. Add dropshadow of V -2, H 2, Opacity 50, Blur 4, black. Now open Animation Shop. Back in PSP, hide the two top shamrock layer.
Right click onto your canvas and choose copy merged, go to AS and right click on background, paste as new animation.
In PSP again, hide the bottom shamrock layer and unhide the middle one, right click onto your canvas and choose copy merged, go to AS and right click on the previously pasted image and choose paste after current frame.
Back in PSP repeat the same step after hiding the middle shamrock layer and unhiding the top one. Paste after current frame in AS again.
Go to Edit/ Select all, then Animation/ Frame properties and set them to 13. Play it, like it, save it ;o)

This tutorial was created March 08, 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.