The Garden of Innocence

The Garden of Innocence

"Know you what it is to be a child?  It is to be something very different from the man of today.  It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism;  it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief, it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear, it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul."

Frances Thompson

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 the incomparable art of Michael Calandra and this stunning kit to go with it by Hungry Hill.  You can purchase this gorgeous combo, which comes with two other beautiful tubes as well at Creative Design Outlet HERE.  Please support the arts and DO NOT use Michael's tubes without a license and please do not share his tubes or this kit.  You will need the four brushes I supplied HERE.  Plugins are Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact, Eye Candy 4000, Xero, and Toadies.  The font is called Scurlock and can be found HERE.

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.

Begin by starting a new 700 x 700 white image, we'll resize in the end.  Then copy and paste the Window element into your new canvas.  Resize it 50% and then duplicate it.  On the duplicated layer set the Blend Mode to hard light.  Now click on your background layer and grab your Preset tool and draw a Rectangle underneath the window.  The color is black.  Convert it to a Raster layer and then using your eraser brush, erase any of the rectangle outside your window element.

Now, on this same layer go to Selections/Select All/Selections/Float/Selections/Defloat add a new Raster Layer and then grab your brush tool and set it to the Light brush I supplied.  Set your foreground color to a orangish yellow (more yellow than orange) and apply your brush to the top of the selection, so it appears to be a light shining into the window.  Selections/Select None.

Copy and paste the Brad element above your background layer and resize it 50%, go to Effects/Plugins/Xero and use these settings:

NOTE:  I applied this plugin to each of my elements for a 'softer feel' if you will.  Next, duplicate the Brad element and go back to the original Brad layer and then go to Effects/Plugins/Toadies/Blast 'em and use these settings:

Then go to Effects/Plugins/Toadies/Blur 'em and use these settings:

Go to the duplicated Brad element layer and go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Corona and use these settings:

Above your background layer add a new Raster layer and apply the background brushes.  Add a new layer for each brush so you can 'tweak' them, ie., rotate, resize or move them around.

Once you have your background like you want it, copy and paste the candleabra-stand on the top of your canvas. Resize it 18% and place to the left or right of your stained glass window and then duplicate and mirror it.  For each of them 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.)

Now copy and paste the Balcony element on top of your canvas, resize it 50% and place it to the bottom of your work.  See my image as a reference for placement.  Apply the Xero plugin and the Perspective Shadow plugin. Your shadow you can even make darker since the palette in that area is very dark.  To soften the bottom edge grab your Selection tool with about a 80% feather and select small areas of the bottom of the Balcony and hit delete a time or two.

Copy and paste vine 2 above the stained glass window, resize it 50%, duplicate and mirror it.  Offset the two a bit for a more natural look of a growing vine.  Give both a fairly dark drop shadow.  Then copy and paste the vine element above the candleabras, resize 35% and then grab your Raster Deform tool and rotate it slightly to the right, then duplicate and mirror it. Duplicate again, resize 75%, rotate to the right to bring it to the original rotation and drag it slightly above the vine on the right, duplicate and mirror once more. ( See my image for size and placement if I confused you there...lol.)

At this point, copy and paste your tube below your Balcony, resize it to fit...again, see my image for size and placement.  Once you have your tube in place and will not move it again, duplicate it 5 times for a total of 6 tube layers.  Hide the top five layers and select the original tube layer in your layer palette and go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Corona and use these settings:

Hide this layer and then go to the second layer in your layer palette, unhide it and then go to Effects/Corona and use these settings:

Repeat this process for the remaining tube layers only increasing the Glow Width by 15 and hit the Random Seed button once.

For the rays behind the angel, add a new Raster layer above the Stained Glass window and apply the brush I supplied in the same color as the light shining through the window,  You can use your Raster Deform tool to resize if needed.  Set the opacity of this layer to 60%.

Above your balcony add your copyright, taking care that it is legal and legible.  For a neat and professional-looking copyright I use a ceriph, copy or pixel font.  You can google and find literally hundreds of these fonts.  Most work best at size 6 with your antialias set to off.

Add your name.  For crisp edges on your regular fonts, set your antialias to sharp.  Once you have typed your name, go to Effects/Plugins/Alien Skin Eye Candy 5/Impact/Chrome and use these settings:

Add a fairly dark drop shadow and then go to Effects/Plugins/Eye Candy 4000/Corona and use these settings:

Add the angel on top of your name and place it to the right of your canvas, give it the same Xero and Perspective Shadow plugins.

Now to animate:

Open Animation Shop (AS), then go back to PSP.  Be sure the top five tube layers are hidden and hold down CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged and go over to AS and hit CTRL + v to paste a new animation.  Go back to PSP, hide the bottom tube layer, unhide the tube layer above the bottom tube layer and hold down CTRL + SHIFT + C to copy merged, and back to AS.  This time hold down CTRL + SHIFT + L to paste after current frame.  Repeat this process for the remaining tube layers.  Once you paste the last tube layer you should have six frames.  Select the last three frames by holding down the the CTRL key and clicking on them.  Go to Animation/Frame Properties and use these settings:

Resize to fit your needs or preferences, check your work (View/Animation).  If satisfied, save as a .gif and you're done.  The only settings you would change for optimizations would be to the very first settings window:

Leave the rest on default...

I'm happy you tried my tutorial.  I hope you had fun with it and maybe even learned something.  Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions you have about any of my tutorials or please let me know of any broken links, etc.

Blessings, 

Trese