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Ellie's Treasures PI Tutorials - Misty Stationery http://www.ellies-treasures.com/pituts/misty-stat-pi/misty-stat-pi.html |
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For this tutorial you
will need: Ulead PhotoImpact Since I rely heavily on third party filters, this tutorial can probably be done in any version. You may have to look around your menus for the menu commands but they will be there. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  Filters and materials needed Simple Filters-Quick Tile- available free here: http://www.btinternet.com/~cateran/simple/ Fantastic Machine Paint Engine - available free here: http://www.fantasticmachines.com/ Presets for Paint Engine - download it here, instructions are in the zip, http://www.ellies-treasures.com/files/tuts/FM%20Paint%20Engine%20settings%20file.zip this is my whole Paint Engine settings file and will put many presets into Paint Engine A tube, psd file, or object (light or pastel floral tubes look best, but not realistic flowers) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I use a little program called the The Image Tiler to preview my tiles to see if they're seamless. Not necessary in PI but useful in the other programs. It's license says it's free to be redistributed and all of the links I found for it are dead, so I've uploaded it. Download it here: http://www.ellies-treasures.com/files/plugins/The%20Image%20Tiler%20v3.0.zip ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My plugin windows may look different from yours as I use Filters Unlimited 2 to manage my plugins - available for purchase here http://www.icnet.de/filters_unlimited/ I am assuming you know the basics of PhotoImpact and where the tools can be located. |
| 1. Open a floral tube that's similar to this one. You need one with at least one large flower. I tried many realistic flower tubes and most looked terrible in the final product, except for very pale or pastel ones. The pale colors look best for a background, on darker backgrounds the misting looks more like a fog. LOL For some reason, the floral art tubes look best. Colorize if you want a different color. I colorized this pink rose as I liked the rose but not the color. If you have one with just a single flower, duplicate the flower and resize and arrange as in step 2. If you have a flower cluster with one large flower and a couple of buds, if they're a decent size, lasso select around the buds and separate them from the main flower so you can place them differently. Duplicate it twice, close the original and minimize one copy. I chose this one. The large one was the original, the other two were the resized ones (I also darkened the two smaller ones a bit, but you don't have to do that).  These are actually on transparent backgrounds, but saving as a jpg made the bg white. |
| 2. Expand the canvas to make more room, doesn't matter how big as you will crop it later. Duplicate the tube layer, resize to 75%. Rotate it a bit so it's at a different angle. Duplicate this smaller flower, click on the transform tool and in the transform toolbar, click on Flip Horizontal. Place one above and one below the main rose and send both to back. Group the layers (right click and group) Once you're happy with it, select just around it with the rectangular selection tool and crop to selection.  |
| 3. Open new canvas, 1280Xheight of the flower cluster+ about 5-10 (for instance, my flower cluster was 335 with about 5 blank pixels at top and bottom, so I made my new canvas 340 high. You want just a bit of room at the top and bottom. |
| 4. Flood fill canvas with a matching color. Be aware that the next step, the Paint Engine, will lighten the whole color a bit so go a bit darker than you want the end result to be. (I used a dark pink #FFB4BA)  |
| 5. Go to Effects>Fantastic Machines Paint Engine and use the pastel sponge preset. This preset is in the zip file I offered in the materials needed section Try clicking on the red, then green, then blue along the bottom right to see which gives the best effect. This will depend on your color used. Usually the default of red is best, in this case the green looked best. Make sure wrap edges is checked.   |
6. Copy your cluster (Control-C) and paste into the new canvas (control-V), move it to the left side |
| 7. Go to Effects>Simple>4 way average. This will put one set of muted flowers along the left and one to the right side. If the misted flowers are too pale to see try changing the blend mode to multiply. Normally you won't have to do that, but can leave it at normal. Try various blend modes, such as darken, multiply, etc to see what works best for your graphic. You can find the blend mode in the layer palette, just above the layers and it will say Normal.  |
| 8. Now take the tube you minimized of just the large center flower and paste it onto the left side right where it was before the filter, then duplicate the single flower layer, and click on the Transform tool and Flip Horizontal. Place it in the right hand cluster of flowers in the same spot as on the left,  |
| This should be close to your end result. As I said, you have to pick the tube carefully for it to turn out nice, but when it does, it's great! LOL  |
| Merge all, watermark and save, you're done! |
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To use as a left border strip, go here: http://www.ellies-treasures.com/statdesign/lc-sideborder/lc-sideborder.html These tutorials on assembling stationery are for Incredimail only, at this point. One day, I'll write a basic tutorial on how to assemble them for Outlook Express. I don't know if you heard, but the new Vista Operating System from Microsoft, coming out later this year or early next year, has replaced Outlook Express with a different email program, called Windows Mail, so as people switch to Vista, I'm not sure what that will mean for OE stationery. |
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l hope you had fun! Back to top |
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If
you have any questions or suggestions, email me at this page http://www.ellies-treasures.com/email/email.html Have a wonderful day! |
| These tutorials are all my own creations. Any resemblance to any other tutorial is purely coincidental and unintentional. Feel free to share any of my tutorials on this site by a link back to my site, but do not copy and send the entire tutorial to anyone or any group. You may also save it to your hard drive (go to File>Save As, and save as an mht file- this will save the pictures with the page in one single file and will open in a browser) or print it out for your own personal use. ©2003-2006 Ellie's Treasures |
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