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Paint Shop Pro 7.02 Tutorial
Suncatcher
Page #2

Intermediate to Advanced

by Joyce Kohl

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Making the Leading
While the lines are still selected, flood fill with white if you're going to use a Blade Pro or a SuperBlade Pro preset. Use your Blade Pro preset now.

If you don't have either Blade Pro version, you can flood fill with any color or pattern you like for your leading. Leading does not have to a shade of pewter. If you choose a pattern or color, then to give it roundness use Effects/3D/Inner Bevel/Round using the default settings. I used SuperBlade Pro and my own bronze preset.

Deselect. [Selections/Select None] Now is a good time to save your work.

Adding Stained Glass
Tip: If you want your suncatcher to be translucent/softer in color, open the layer palette on any stained glass tile. Right-click on the background layer to open the option menu, then select promote to layer. Now slide the little tool [looks like two white arrows with points facing each other] on the right side of the 100. Slide to the left to lower the opacity until it suits you. Then fill your sections. You can also colorize your tiles -- Colors/Colorize -- move the Hue and Saturation sliders to select colors.

This tutorial's suncatcher is not translucent. I filled the sections one or two at a time. I seldom fill all same-color sections at once because it will appear as if one sheet of glass was used instead of separate pieces of stained glass. Always rotate the patterns for a realistic stained glass look.

Open all the stained glass tiles you are going to use. If any of them have shadows around the edges, crop off the shadows. Minimize all the tiles. To use the tiles, select the pattern option on your foreground setting, then click on the pattern you wish to use. Tip: If you make a lot of stained glass, put your favorite tiles in your PSP7 Patterns folder. Then they're always available for use.

Using the Magic Wand Tool with the tolerance still set to 81, I selected two petals on each flower, then flood filled with one of the yellow tiles. You can play around with the tolerance level, but I continued to use 81, and didn't have to expand my selections. Then I selected more petals and filled them. Each time I filled a section, I rotated the angle of the tile. For the inside areas of the flowers, I chose another yellow tile for the filling. I also used two shades of green for the leaves and stems, rotating the angle for each section by about 45 each time.

Pattern Setting   Flowers filled with shades of yellow

Sometimes filling with the tiles may not completely cover the section and may leave white pixels around the edges. If this happens, undo the flood fill, choose Selections/Modify/Expand/1. This will enlarge the selected area for filling by one pixel and hide any white pixels showing between the glass and the leading.

Guide for Tiles:

Flower Petals: 1102rr.jpg
Inside Petals: 1102w.jpg
Leaves: 125rr.jpg
Stems: 121w.jpg
Background [select all sections and fill all at the same time]: appleblossom.jpg
Frame: irid3.jpg

Fixing Seams
Some tiles you select may be small and leave a seam when filling a section. Before I downloaded the original tiles from Spectrum Glass for this tutorial, I used one from another Web site which apparently had been reduced by about 50%. It left seams like this one:


Image Showing seam left by a small tile

I used the Edit/Undo to remove the bad fill, then rotated the small tile to 180, and filled again.

Pattern box showing settings used for irid3.jpg   Suncatcher with no seams

Another way to prevent seams for your stained glass fills is to select an area inside the tile with your Selection Tool/Rectangle tool, anti-alias checked, feathering unchecked, then choose Selections/Convert to Seamless Pattern. If you want to save your seamless tile, save with a different name.


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