Corel Paint Shop Pro Tutorial
Making sparkle tubes for graphic design
How to make sparkle tubes to use on website images and graphic projects

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PSP Tutorials

How to make sparkle tubes

Sparkles give certain images an added dimension as to the look and balance of the overall project.

Making your own sparkles and saving them as Tubes is not hard. You will get a great deal of enjoyment knowing you are using your own creative flair to form your webpage images.

Let's make a basic silver sparkle, once you have the hang of things you can go ahead and make sparkles to your own requirements.

The sparkles tutorial is quite graphic intense as we have used screenshots to compliment each step. We have split the tutorial over 2 pages to facilitate page loading times. Please follow the link after step 7 to complete the tutorial.

STEP 1

Open a new square image.

Make the background Black so it is easier to work on and the image should be large enough to make detail easier to handle. For this tutorial we will use 300x300

STEP 2

Add a new Layer
Layers || New Raster Layer

On the new layer, draw a white horizontal ellipse (or any color you want) using the Preset Shapes Tool.  Antialias = Checked

A combination of the width of this ellipse and the percentage of deformation in the next step will affect the ultimate width of your sparkles spokes and you can adjust both to your own requirements.

STEP 3

Go to Effects || Geometric Effects || Perspective Horizontal

Set the % Difference slider at 100.

STEP 4

Mirror the image Image || Mirror and repeat the Geometric Effect in Step 3.

STEP 5

Deform the image again by repeating Step 3. This time set the difference slider to around 85% or to the thickness you want the spoke of your sparkle to be.

Mirror and repeat.

STEP 6

Copy the image to your clipboard and paste it as a new layer.
Edit || Copy ....... Edit || Paste || As New Layer

Rotate the image 90 Degrees to form a cross.
Image || Rotate || 90 Degrees

STEP 7

Paste another spoke and rotate that by 45 Degrees to the Left and the repeat again and rotate this spoke to the Right.

Edit || Paste || As New Layer .......
Image || Rotate || 45 Degrees

If you want these spokes a little shorter than the vertical or horizontal spokes, resize by going to Image || Resize

Check Percentage of Original and uncheck Resize all Layers. In the example, we have resized the two "45 degree spokes" to 80% of the original.

Follow this link below to complete the sparkles tutorial.