A Spell For A Prince
(Since the kiss didn't work)
You know how when you were a little kid and you believed in fairy tales, that fantasy of what your life would be, white dress, prince charming who would carry you away to a castle on a hill. You would lie in bed at night and close your eyes and you had complete and utter faith. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Prince Charming, they were so close you could taste them, but eventually you grow up, one day you open your eyes and the fairy tale disappears. Most people turn to the things and people they can trust. But everyone has that smallest bit of hope, of faith, that one day they will open their eyes and it will come true.
This tutorial was written by me on September 20th, 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 this adorable combo from Creative Design Outlet featuring the art of Jasmine Becket-Griffith and the talented scrapping of Dee's Sign Post. You can purchase the Inspired By pack HERE. It will be released Friday 09-21-2012. Please support the arts and do not use Jasmine's tubes without a license and please do not share her tubes or this kit. You will need the brush I supplied HERE. You will also need the animation coming from her wand by Lovey you can download from here page HERE. It's not in the previews on that page but in the zip for today's downloads. Plugins are Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact and Eye Candy 4000. Font is King Arthur and can be found HERE.
Now grab your magic wand and let's do this...
First we need to get your brushes into PSP for use. It's just a couple easy steps.
Open the files I provided into PSP. They're in .png format, you can also use .jpegs. For each brush go to File/Export/Custom Brush. Name your brush and click Ok and it's installed in PSP ready for use.
Alright, now don't freak out but start a new 1000 x 1000 white image. I like to work big when animating with the Mesh Warp tool and so that's how I will write this tut. We will resize in the end. Copy and paste frame 1 into your new canvas and resize it 75%, then use your Raster Deform tool (or Pick tool in newer versions) and rotate it to the left about 15 degrees. Then add a fairly dark drop shadow:
Next, copy and paste your tube below your frame, you shouldn't need to resize it. Move it where part of the skeleton on the right is a little outside the frame, then duplicate it and drag the duplicate to the top of the frame. Use your eraser brush to erase the areas of the tube outside the frame on the right side.
Copy and paste element 2, the grass, above your background layer and then drag it to the bottom of your frame where it appears your tube is sitting on it.
Copy and paste paper 6 above the grass element and use your Raster Deform tool to drag the edges in to fit the paper into your frame then use your eraser tool to erase any of the paper outside the frame. Your work should be looking like this...
Next copy and paste frame 2 above the grass layer, resize it 80%, duplicate it, resize it 75%, duplicate again and resize again 75%. Use my image as a reference for placement of these frames. Copy and paste paper 5 below these frames and then copy and paste paper 3 above that paper layer. Use your eraser brush to erase any parts of both of these papers outside your circle frames, then set the Blend Layer on the top paper, paper 3, to Screen. Don't forget to add the same drop shadow to each of these circle frames.
For the background brush, add a new Raster layer over your background layer and apply your brush, you can use your Raster Deform tool to tweak it. Add a new layer for each brush.
For the background brush, add a new Raster layer over your background layer and apply your brush, you can use your Raster Deform tool to tweak it. Add a new layer for each brush.
Now, above the circle frames, copy and paste element 14, resize it 110% and move it to the right of your work. Use your Raster Deform tool to rotate it slightly to the right. Go to Effects/Plugins/Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact and use these settings:
Then go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Gradient Glow and use these settings:
In this example I have my original frog layer hidden in my layer palette. For this next step you should have your's unhidden. Grab your Mesh Warp tool with the following settings:
Drag the nodes at the bottom of the frogs belly down slightly and the nodes to the side of his belly out slightly and click the check mark to apply the warp. Then select your Move tool to get rid of the Mesh.
Hide the frog layer you added the Mesh Warp to and hold down CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged and then open Animation Shop (AS). Once it's open hit CTRL + v to paste a new animation and go back to PSP. Unhide the frog layer which is hidden and again hit CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged and go back to AS. This time hold down CTRL + SHIFT + L to paste after current frame. You should have two frames. Open Lovey's animation into AS and notice it has 30 frames, so our newly pasted animation must also have 30 frames. But first we are going to set the animation speed for the frog at 15 by going to Edit/Select All and then Animation/Frame Properties and set the speed on 20.
Now go to Edit/Copy on your animation and then select the second frame and hit CTRL + SHIFT + L to paste after current frame, then select the last frame and repeat, do this until you have thirty frames....will be 15 times since 15 x 2 is 30.
Drag your slider bar all the way to the left and go to Edit/Select All. Do the same on Lovey's animation...BOTH SLIDER BARS MUST BE ALL THE WAY TO THE LEFT. Click on the first frame of Lovey's animation and hold down your mouse button. Drag the animation into the first frame where you want it in your animation. Do not let go until you have it where you want it. If you mess up, just Edit/Undo and redrag.
Check your work by going to View/Animation. If you're happy then resize to fit your needs or preferences, save as a .gif and you're done. Change only the following optimization settings:
Thank you for trying my tutorial. I hope you had fun with it and maybe even learned something. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about any of my tutorials and please let me know about broken links, etc.
Blessings,
Trese
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.)
Using my image as a reference for size and placement, begin to copy and paste the remaining elements into your canvas. Remember you can always use your Raster Deform or Pick Tool for precise sizing. On the mushrooms inside the circle frames I used the same Perspective Shadow, but for the elements with the shadow cast beneath them I used the following settings...go to Effects/Plugins/Perspective Shadow:
And remember you can always tweak your shadow by moving your nodes around. You can move one node at a time by holding down your CTRL key.
At this point add your name and your copyright, taking care that the copyright is legal and legible. For a neat and professional-looking copyright I use a pixel, ceriph or copy font. You can google and find literally hundreds of these fonts. Most work best at size six with your Antialias set to off. Now for this tutorial, since we're working larger for my ceriph font I used size 8 and set my antialias to Sharp and it looked better. Some of these pixel fonts you can cheat a little and get away with it. The particular one I used is ceriph 07_56. Once you add your name, go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Bevel Boss and use these settings:
Then go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Gradient Glow and use these settings:
Add a drop shadow...
Now we'll set the frog up for animation. Once you have him placed, don't move him again or your animation will be distorted. Duplicate the frog and on the duplicate grab your Selection tool with a feather of about 20 and delete these areas of the frog:
Drag the nodes at the bottom of the frogs belly down slightly and the nodes to the side of his belly out slightly and click the check mark to apply the warp. Then select your Move tool to get rid of the Mesh.
Hide the frog layer you added the Mesh Warp to and hold down CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged and then open Animation Shop (AS). Once it's open hit CTRL + v to paste a new animation and go back to PSP. Unhide the frog layer which is hidden and again hit CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged and go back to AS. This time hold down CTRL + SHIFT + L to paste after current frame. You should have two frames. Open Lovey's animation into AS and notice it has 30 frames, so our newly pasted animation must also have 30 frames. But first we are going to set the animation speed for the frog at 15 by going to Edit/Select All and then Animation/Frame Properties and set the speed on 20.
Now go to Edit/Copy on your animation and then select the second frame and hit CTRL + SHIFT + L to paste after current frame, then select the last frame and repeat, do this until you have thirty frames....will be 15 times since 15 x 2 is 30.
Drag your slider bar all the way to the left and go to Edit/Select All. Do the same on Lovey's animation...BOTH SLIDER BARS MUST BE ALL THE WAY TO THE LEFT. Click on the first frame of Lovey's animation and hold down your mouse button. Drag the animation into the first frame where you want it in your animation. Do not let go until you have it where you want it. If you mess up, just Edit/Undo and redrag.
Check your work by going to View/Animation. If you're happy then resize to fit your needs or preferences, save as a .gif and you're done. Change only the following optimization settings:
Thank you for trying my tutorial. I hope you had fun with it and maybe even learned something. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about any of my tutorials and please let me know about broken links, etc.
Blessings,
Trese
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