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| 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.
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1. Create a New Image, 400x400
pixels with a transparent background. |
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. |
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! |
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. |
5. Go to Selections/Modify/ Expand...
and expand the selection by 2 pixels. |
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. |
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). |
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. |
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. |
10. Your image should now look a little
like this. On page 2 we will use our glass textures. |