Merry Christmas

This is what we're making.

Needed:

LMC Tag back: Merry Christmas by ME (scroll down a bit, right click and save or copy and paste in your PSP)

Gold Pattern (found HERE or you may use whatever you have on hand)

Christmas Dingbats (I used Christmas Regular, Christmas Time, and 2Peas Tis The Season)

2 Script fonts of choice (I used Mea Culpa & 2Peas Piano Recital)

Eye Candy 4000 (Gradient Glow)

Animation Shop

Right click, save to your hard drive and open in PSP:

LMC-Tagback-ByDaira-Tutorial-MerryC.png TagBack Merry Christmas picture by lovingmiranda

1. Paste my tagback as New Layer in PSP on your working canvas with dimensions of 600 x 600. Rename this layer to Tagback.

2. In a New Layer with your Text Tool, set font to whatever dingbat you're using. Use White color as background and foreground null, then choose desire size, mine arranges from 36 to 48; set it to a size that will make the dingbat fit in each square of the tagback. You will need to do this 8 times, so you ended up with a total of 8 Christmas images in each single square. Deselect. Rename this layer as Shapes. Hide your background Layer and merge down together the TagBack and Shapes layer. Rename this layer Tagback & Shapes. You now have this:

LMC-Tutorials-ByDaira-MerryChris-2.png MC I picture by lovingmiranda

3. Unhide your background layer, duplicate your Tagback & Shapes layer. In your layer palette, highlight the original layer and adjust Blur - Gaussian Blur - with Radius of 20 - OK. Now, set the Tagback & Shapes Layer and its copy both to Dissolve blend mode. Your Tagback should dissolve all around, kind of like snow. If you are unsure about how to change the blend mode of your layers, look at my preview:

LMC-Tutorials-ByDaira-MerryChristma.png MC III picture by lovingmiranda

You will see an ellipse around the blend modes that need to be change.

And you should now have something like this:

LMC-Tutorials-ByDaira-MerryChris-1.png MC II picture by lovingmiranda

4. Add a New Layer and rename as Name, Select your Text tool with settings:

Create as: Floating, Font:Mea Culpa, Size:72, Stroke Width:2, Font Style:Bold, Anti-alas:Sharp, Kerning:0 and Line Style: Solid. Open the Gold Pattern in your PSP. And set both, the Foreground and Background as the gold pattern with Angle of 0 and Scale of 100 in your material properties. Type out Merry X-mas or whatever wording you would like, and apply text. Do not Deselect. Go to Selections, Modify, Expand by 1 pixel, hit OK. Add a New Layer, and move this layer below your Text layer. Floodfill this selection with color black. Deselect.

5. Hide all your layers except for the New Layer & Text Layer. Merge down this two layers together, and rename as Text. Apply a Gradient Glow: Glow Width - 3.00, Color choose the Fat option with color White. Give a desire Drop Shadow, I used these settings:

Vertical & Horizontal: 1, Opacity: 50, Blur: 5, Color:Black.

6. Arrange your text however you want, I put mine in the bottom of the tagback. Preview here:

LMC-Tutorials-ByDaira-MerryChris-3.png MC IV picture by lovingmiranda

7. Now add your watermark. And your name, I used font 2Peas Piano Recital with Size 48 and added a slightly Drop Shadow. Arrange your name right below X-mas. Crop off the excess area of your canvas.

8. Open Animation Shop.

9. In PSP go to edit, copy merged and paste it in Animation Shop as New Animation. Go to Animation, Frame Properties and set the Display Time to 125. And now time to animate:

In the layer palette, select the copy of Tagback & Shapes, and set the opacity of this layer to 75. Copy and paste in animation shop After Current Frame. Set the Display Time to 75.

Back in PSP, set the opacity to 50 of the Copy of Tagback & Shapes layer. Copy and paste After Current Frame in AS. Set Display Time to 75.

Again, back in PSP, in the copy of Tagback & Shapes layer set the opacity to 25. Copy and paste After Current Frame in AS and set its Display Time to 75.

Go back to PSP, set the opacity to 0 to the Tagback & Shapes layer. Copy & paste in AS after Current Frame and set Display Time to 75.

And finally, back in PSP set opacity of the Tagback & Shapes layer to 100 (its normal opacity). Copy and paste after Current Frame in AS changing its Display time to 125. You should now have 6 frames total.

10. Still in AS, go to Edit - Select All - Copy - Paste Copy as New Animation, Select All and Reverse Frames (go to Animation). Make sure they are all selected, and copy.

11. Back in your animation (the 6 frames), select the last frame. When selected, you should see a Blue Line around the frame. Now go to Edit, Paste After Current Frame. You should now have 12 frames total.

To make sure that you have a total of 12 frames, check in the bottom right corner of AS, make sure that it marks 12 Frames.

12. Now, time to check if our tag is animated. The Christmas dingbat should appear and disappear in a slow motion. If you are happy with your animation, you can now save and give a fancy name.

*You can also change the display time if the frames if you know how to work with them or did not like how I got mine.

And there you go, you have a new tag special for the Holidays. You can also use the same method to create this kind of tag for any other Holiday. Just grab your dingbats and let your imagination flow!

Thanks for trying my tutorial!

Xoxo

Daira

This tutorial was written by Daira on September 11th, 2009 for Loving Miranda Creationz.

The concept of this tutorial is copyrighted to me, so whatever you create using my tutorial are yours, as long as the resultas are not use for any kind of profit.

Feel free to print out this tutorial for your own personal use, or you may share my link with others, but do not attemp to claim as your own.