These guys are really simple to make with just a few clicks of the mouse and PSP !! This tutorial assumes you have a general working knowledge of most of the tools in Paint Shop Pro version 6 or greater. Let's get started.
Need idea's ? visit the Ghost Gallery
1. Open a new image, 400 x 400 with a transparent background. Select the shapes tool and set the settings to match mine. Make sure that retain style is not checked and then set your foreground color to black and background color to white if it is not already set. Make sure that they created as vector is checked also. Just leave the line style default set . (Fig 1)
2. Draw out your shape on the canvas
leaving some room at the tops and bottoms of the shape. You will need
this to add the funky shape thing at the top of my goofy ghost. (Fig
2)
If you don't like it, you can always change it back later. Click
your node editing tool (aka the vector selection tool), click
the control panel and select the node editing option from the
palette. (Fig 3) This will allow us to add the little funnies
and strange shapes at the top and or bottom of the ghost.
When you click it you will notice that your shape loses the color fill
that we have set and you can't see the outline no longer either. This
is normal and you will be able to see it again when we are no longer in node
edit mode so don't panic yet . LOL. (Fig 4)
3.
To make the tutorial easier to view here I have added a blue backround behind
my ghost. Yours should still be transparent, please disregard my blue bg, it
is strictly to make it easier for you to be able to see the nodes in the screen
shots. Now hold down the control key and we are going to add a
couple nodes to shape our ghost. The view here shows the first image as how
it would look if you were NOT in node edit and where the original clicks for
adding the nodes should be. (RED) So while
holding down the control key click your image where you see my red
dots at, on each side of the top center node (YELLOW).
(Fig 5) Then when finsihed, release the control key. Now click
the top-center node (YELLOW DOT) the one
between the two nodes you just added and drag it off to the right to a point
like you see mine here. (Fig 6)
4. Run your mouse over the area of yellow until
it turns in to a little double arrow with rounded corners like you see
in the shot here. When it does this allows us to round the curve/turn that we
just made giving it a smoother more curvey edges instead of the sharp corners.
(Fig 7)
Then grab the other end of the handle (PINK)
and adjust it to
give a smoother, more curvey edges also like you see on mine here. Feel free
to play with them and adjust them how you want them, they do not have to be
exactly like mine. Mine are intended as guidelines only. (Fig 8)
5. When you are happy with the shape of the curve right click and choose
end node edit option from the menu (Fig 9) Your image should
now show back up with the fill color and the new shape you made with the node
editing like or similar to mine here. (Fig 10)
6. Choose the node edit mode again and now we just need to do
the bottom of the critter to somewhat match the top of the ghost. Make it going
in the other direction or something just to give it some character if you like.
You can see here I added the same color coding as I did above in step
4. (Fig 11) At this point if you are comfortable working with
the nodes you can add some more anywhere you like and shape them to whatever
shape that you like. You can see by mine that the YELLOW dots are the orginal
nodes that you see in step 2 and the RED dots
are all the nodes I added at this point to shape a curve to get the resulting
shape you see in figure 12. (Fig 12)
7. Now let's try and give him a little character if we can. LOL I started with
the line tool and made some simple lines for the mouth. I choose
bezier lines with a one width and then twisted them a little to look like
a mouth. For the eyes and the rest of the mouth I went back to the
shapes tool and choose simple black ellipse with black fill and positioned
them on the face. (Fig 13) If you are using PSP 7 then you can
choose from some of the shapes they have included with it, you might remember
them from being objects in previous versions and I have also seen them as tubes.
Play around and experiment. There are tons of things you can do I just haven't had time to get them all together and ready to display. Below are two of the ones I came up with just messing with the shapes of the bodies and adding a feminine and masculine item to each. LOL
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September 27, 2000
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