You will need

You will need:

Paint Shop Pro
Animation Shop
Plugin - Xenofex 2.0/Lightning (or any lightning plugin)
Scary tube of your choice. I'm using Anna Ignatieva. Please visit this talented artist here.
Font of your choice. Mine here.

Lets begin. Open your tube, and click shift + D to duplicate it, then close the original. Increase your canvas size so that you have enough room around your tube to add text. We can crop around later. Add a new raster layer, and flood fill with black. Move this to the bottom, under your tube. Now duplicate your tube.

On your top copy of the tube, zoom in on the eyes and take your freehand selection tool, on add and select around the eyes like so.

Then go selection, invert and hit delete. Deselect, and you should now just have the eyes on this layer. We need to lock your eyes with the original tube now, so that if you have to reposition your tube, the eyes will stay in the same place. So with your eye layer active, click on the Layer Link Toggle (this is the image of chain links above your layers).

Then activate your tube layer and click the Toggle again once. These two layers are now locked together.

Add a new raster layer. We are now going to add the lightning. There are several plugins out there with lightning effect in it, and I believe that some versions of PSP come with a random tube lightning. I prefer to use Xenofex 2.0/Lightning. But you may use which every you choose. If you are using mine, I used the following settings.

Position the top and bottom of the lightning rods as you wish. I did the top off to the right, and the bottom towards the left corner. Click OK. Add another raster layer, add the lightning again, click Random. Repeat another layer of this. You should now have three layers of lightning, your tube, eyes, black background, and copyright if your tube had this attached.

I'm going to add a picture frame to mine, just to take away the square image of the tag. Reposition your tube as you need to, and move your copyright to the top so that it appears in the white of the tag. If you are keeping your tag without a picture frame, you may wish to add a white drop shadow or gradient glow to your copyright so that it is visible.

Now time to add your text. I'm using Halloween Spider, using a light colour from my tube, a black outline, stroke 1, vector layer. Position and resize as you wish, and convert to a raster layer. You may wish to leave your text like this, or give it an inner bevel as I'm doing. So using your magic wand set at 'Add', click each letter. If using the same font you may find that it doesn't select completely. You want all the text, but not the web and spiders, so click until you have everything you want. Then go to effect/inner bevel and add the following settings.

Add a drop shadow of your choice. Crop around the image to get rid of any unwanted space around your tag.

Now hide everything accept your copyright, text and picture frame, and merge visible. Now we are going to move over to animation. So unhide the black background, and the eyes layer. You should now have these and the merged layer. Copy merged, and paste as a new animation in Animation Shop.

Now hide the eyes layer, and unhide the tube layer and the bottom lightning layer, copy merged, and paste after current frame. Back in PSP, hide this lightning, unhide the next, copy merged, and paste after current frame. Do the same with the last lightning.

Now in animation you should have four frames, one with no lightning, and three different lightning frames.

Right, now hope you are paying attention. Click on your first frame, copy, click on your second frame and paste after current frame. Click on your second frame, copy, click on your third frame, and paste after current frame. So your first five frames should consist of the first two frames. Now click on the sixth frame and paste after current frame. Copy, click on the seventh frame, paste after current frame. Copy, click on the eighth frame, and paste after currant frame. Now click on your tenth frame, paste after current frame, copy, click on the eleventh frame and paste after current frame.

So you now have twelve frames. Between each lightning frame should be a black eyes frame, and there should be two of each of the three lightning frames. Change the frame properties of the first, fifth and ninth frame to 100.

Animate. Feel free to play around with the frame properties if you want the lightning to be quicker, or longer spaces between each flash. Save as a gif file.

Here is another example of the finished results.

You are done. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

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 22nd July 2006 by Faerie Queen.