You will need:

Paint Shop Pro
Animation Shop
Three seasonal pictures.  I'm using the art of Jon Rattenbury.  You can purchase his art through My PSP Tubes
Animated snow by Bieke from her site here
My template here

Lets start.  Open up my template.  Hide the logo layer.  Activate the background.  Select one of your images and copy and paste as a new layer onto your canvas.  Position it under one of the rectangles.  Take your magic wand.  Activate your template layer and click inside the rectangle you have positioned your image under.  Click Selections/Modify/Expand by 3.  Click on the image layer.  Click Selections/Invert and hit delete.  Select none.

Repeat this with your other two images putting the snow image in the centre rectangle.  Add a drop shadow to the template.  Then add any text, copyright and your name.

Lets add the animation.  Activate the centre image and copy.  Paste as a new animation in Animation Shop.

Open up the snow animation that you downloaded from Bieke's site.  Select all.  Back on your image.  Duplicate it until you have the same amount of frames as the snow.  Select all.  Back on the snow, click copy.  On your images, paste into selected frames.

Back in PSP, hide all layers except the background and three images.  Copy merged.  Paste as a new animation over in Animation Shop.  Duplicate until you have the same amount of frames as your animation.  Select all.  On your animation frames copy.  On your images paste into selected frames.  Line up with the original images.  Once lines up, click.  If you didn't line up correctly, just undo and try again.

Back in PSP.  Hide the background and images and unhide the rest.  Copy merged.  Paste as a new animation.  Duplicate until you have the same amount of frames as your animation.  Select all.  Copy, and on your animation paste into selected frames.

Animate and save.

This is just a basic animated tag.  Embellish it as you see fit.


 Please feel free to link to this tutorial, and/or print it out for your own personal use, but DO NOT copy it in ANY way to put on-line, pass out, or re-write without my permission.  Any resemblance to any other tutorial like this is purely coincidental.   Thank you.  This tutorial was written on the 28th December 2009 by Faerie Queen.