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Glass Rose Letters
Paint Shop Pro 6

This tutorial is dedicated to all those enthusiastic people at the Annexcafe Paint Shop Pro Tubes Newsgroup who asked me so nicely to write a tutorial for this! Hope you enjoy it!

Before you start, you'll need some stained glass textures. I downloaded all of mine from Spectrum Glass. I found that a sneaky trick if you're in a hurry or just want a specific colour, is to download a few different textures in different colours, then use freeware Harry's Videorave Col@rize1.3 filter which you can download from The Plugin Site. This works better than the colorize... option in PSP, as you can adjust the RGB values which gives you more control and a greater range of colours to get the exact shade you want. Another little hint is to use the browser in PSP to choose & organise your textures. You can drag the thumbnail anywhere in the browser ie. you can arrange the textures in colour order! This makes it a lot easier.

For this tutorial, I used a font called Old English Text MT. Obviously, you can use any font you like, but if you want to use one like mine and you don't have have one, try these sites:
Font Freak - try these fonts: beckett, burgundian, English Towne, cadeaulx, celebrate, goethe, textur
Font Garden - try these fonts: beckett, cadeaulx, textura quodrata, theodoric, gothic straight faced
Incidently, these are two of my favourite font sites. If you like fonts, they come highly recommended.

File/New 1. Create a New Image, 400x400 pixels with a transparent background.
Flood Fill 2. Flood Fill the image with white. You may ask why not just create a new image with a white background to begin with - if you create one with a transparent background, it is automatically a layer to begin with which saves time and possible frustration later.
New Layer 3. On the Layers Palette, choose New Layer. In the Layer Properties dialogue box that now appears, give the layer a useful name - we're going to use this layer to hold lead outline of the stained glass, so I'm going to call mine "Lead Edging", nice and simple!
Font Tool 4. Click on the Font Tool. In the Text Entry dialogue box, choose the font you want to use. For this tutorial, I am just doing one letter, but the same technique applies to whole words. Make the size quite large, about 110. In the large white box, type the text you want to use. Where is says Create As, make sure that Floating is selected and that Antialias is ticked. It doesn't matter what colour you text is at the moment, as we will Flood Fill a different colour in a moment. Click OK. Move the text to roughly the centre of your canvas and keep it selected.
Expand Selection 5. Go to Selections/Modify/
Expand...
and expand the selection by 2 pixels.
Match Mode 6. Choose a medium grey for your foreground colour. I usually use R156, G156, B156. Change the Match Mode in Flood Fill - Tool Options from RGB to None. All parts of the selection will be filled at the same time.Flood Fill your selection in grey.
Hollow A 7. Go to Selections/Modify/Contract... and contract you selection by 3. Delete the selection & you should be left with a hollow letter. Deselect your letter (CTRL+D or Selections/Select None).
The line tool dialoque box 8. Click on the Line Tool. In Tool Options - Draw, under Type choose Single Line, Style choose Stroked, Width type 3 and ensure that Antialias is the only box which is ticked.
Drawing connecting lines 9. I find it helps in this step to zoom into your image a bit. Using the line tool, draw the connecting lines which the glass would be attached to. There are no hard and fast rules for doing this, I usually use the naturally occuring projections in the letters and extend them.
Grey outline that will be the leading 10. Your image should now look a little like this. On page 2 we will use our glass textures.

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