Ode to Autumn PTU

This tutorial was written by me on September 9th, 2012. Any resemblance to any other tutorial or tag is unintentional and is pure coincidence. Please do not claim my work as your own and do not post to any other website, blog or forum without permission from me. It is written with the assumption that you have a working knowledge of PSP and its components. It was written for PSP 9.

I recommend that you read through this or any tutorial you are attempting before starting it so you will know what to expect and how to get organized.

As with any of my tutorials when a plugin is required, change only the settings I recommend and leave the others on the default settings.

What you will need to accomplish this tutorial is the stunning art of Barbara Jensen which you can purchase on her site HERE, this absolutely beautiful kit by the amazing Crazy Carita which you can purchase at Creative Design Outlet HERE.  Please support the arts and DO NOT use Barbara's tubes without a license and certainly do not share Barb's tubes or this kit.  Plugin is Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact.  Font is Amadeus which is a pay font that you can purchase HERE.

Let's get started...

Start a new 700 x 700 white image, we'll resize later.  Copy and paste fr4 into your new canvas, resize it 60% and move it slightly to the right.  Give it a slight drop shadow, something like this...

Copy and paste your tube below your frame.  Use my image as a reference for placement.  Once you have her in place, duplicate her and drag the duplicate to the top of your canvas over your frame.  Delete the lower portion of the tube outside the frame and then go back to the original tube and erase the lower portion of it outside the frame.  Once this is done go to Adjust/Automatic Saturation Enhancement and use these settings:

If you want richer color, you could apply this effect twice.

Now on the duplicated tube let's give her a perspective shadow so she really appears to be sticking out of the frame.  Go to Effects/Plugins/Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact/Perspective Shadow and use these settings:

This plugin may require a little practice.  There are just a couple of important things to remember when shadowing is to attempt to make your shadows appear natural and to watch closely all the areas of whatever you're shadowing.  You can view all the areas by moving the little red box around at the top of the window of this plugin...

(You can tweak your shadows by moving the nodes around in the preview window. To move one node at a time hold down your CTRL key. You can move the whole shadow by holding down your right mouse button and clicking in the middle of the shadow.  It's very important to think about how a shadow would be cast realistically and how dark or how light it should be. This plugin is one of my favorites and one I use with nearly every single one of my tags.)

Again using my image as a reference for size and placement begin to copy and paste the rest of the elements into your canvas.  Your placement doesn't have to be exact.  The important thing to remember about foliage, flowers, etc is that nature doesn't grow symmetrically...it's wild and unpredictable.  And for interest and tension in your design use an odd number of elements.  To give my butterflies more dimension I also used the perspective shadow on those.

For the flowers and the butterflies in the background, make them various sizes and simply decrease their opacity to right around 50%.  Use your Selection tool with a feather of about 90% and select small areas of some of them to soften the edges.

For the wagon wheel I pasted a paper behind it and fit in an interesting part of the paper and erased the areas outside the middle part of the wheel.

For the name go to Effects/Plugins/Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact/Chrome and use these settings:

Then go to Adjust/Hue & Saturation/Colorize and use these settings:

Then give it a drop shadow something like this...

Now add your copyright taking care that it is legal and legible.  For a neat and professional-looking copyright I use pixel, copy or ceriph fonts.  You can google and find literally hundreds of these fonts.  Most of them work best at size 6 with your antialias set to off...it prevents the font from pixelating.  Note:  for crisp edges on your fonts for your name, wordart, etc set your Antialias to Sharp.

Resize and save as a .png or .jpeg and you're done.  (HINT:  if you're finding you're getting some distortion when you resize, especially with your fonts.  Resize first and then add your name and copyright.  The way I resize in PSP is first I will hide my background, merge all visible layers and then use my Raster Deform tool (pick tool in newer versions) to pull in and down on the sides a little ways...be sure you pull in and down evenly or you will have distortion.  Then I resize my canvas the size I want it, if it's too much I will undo and then resize my work a little more until I get it to fit into the size of the canvas I want...then I add my name and copyright.)

I hope you enjoyed my tutorial and maybe learned something to help hone your skills. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you have about any of my tutorials. And please let me know of broken links, etc.

Blessings,

Trese