Ellie's Treasures PhotoImpact Tutorials-Stencil Tag

Click here for other examples This will open in a new window and print out on standard 8½" X 11" paper For information about which fonts, programs, etc I used to construct my pages and my headers, click here.
For this tutorial you will need: Ulead PhotoImpact - available for purchase or trial here Filters and materials needed Fonts: butterflips and Japanese Designs dingbat fonts (or other butterfly and flower dingbats) , and Stencil Sans for the name ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Converted with permission from the PSP tutorial by Graphic Butterfly. Find the PSP tutorial here ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I am assuming you know the basics of PhotoImpact and where the tools can be located.
Here are some arrows and bars you can drag and drop where you need to mark or underline where you are. . Just left click and drag to where you want it then let go. They will stay where you put them until you close your browser.
1. Open the two dingbat fonts by double-clicking on each file and just minimize to the task bar. They will now be available to your program. Do this before you click on the text tool. Open canvas 500 X 500, white. Click on Path tool>Outline Drawing tool (click on the little arrow in the bottom right corner of the path drawing tool to find it), set to 3D round. Click on the material icon and click on the border/depth tab Change the Maximum border width to 10 and the depth to 15. Click ok. Choose the circle for the shape. Draw a circle in center of canvas, 300 pixels large (watch bottom left of window, the final two numbers are the width and height. Color doesn't matter at this point. Go up to pick tool and in the pick toolbar, click on the icon that looks like this to center the circle in the canvas.
2. go to Edit>Fill>Gradient tab, choose multiple colors and click on the color box. The Palette editor will open, choose a color you like. I picked 006, click ok and in the Fill panel, choose the diagonal arrow. Click ok and it will fill the canvas with the gradient, diagonal, from upper left to lower right.
3. Have your fonts open and minimized on your task bar. Click on the text tool, select the Japanese Designs font (or whatever flower font you are using) set to size 150. Color doesn't matter. Set mode to 3D round. I used the upper case T. Others that worked were the G, H, K, M, R, and U. Click on your pick tool so the flower is selected with marching ants around it, go back to Edit>Fill and apply the same gradient you used for the circle.
4. Change your font to the Butterflips or whatever butterfly font you have chosen. Leave the size at 150. Choose any letter that suits you. I chose lower case a. Use the transform tool set at rotate freely (in the transform toolbar, under rotate method), rotate it and move it down to the edge of the circle. Feel free to use the transform tool set to resize to resize any of these objects as you go along. All three (the circle, the flower and the butterfly are all objects to this point and can be moved around, size changed, and rotated as you please. If you right click and select all, right click and group and then drag to your easy palette, you can save these objects to use again later, together or separately (you don't have to group them to save them as a group to your easy palette, as long as they are all selected, I just do it because it's easier). At any time before merging into background or merging as single object, you can change the gradient fill, move them, resize them, rotate them, etc.
5. Now to make the text, pick your text tool, change to a stencil font, I used Stencil Sans. Set font to 3D round, color doesn't matter, size 48. Click on center to center the text. Type out what you want. If you have more than one word, I prefer to do them separately so I can move them closer to each other or move them around independently if I want. I find that by default the vertical spacing between words is often too large. To move the words around, click on the pick tool. You can use the transform tool to rotate them. Once they are placed where you want, click on Edit>Fill>Gradient and change the gradient direction to horizontal (the second arrow, pointing sideways). If you look at the sample box, the gradient lines should be going vertically. Click on OK. If you want to, if you want to make sure the flowers are behind the text, right click on the flowers and click on arrange, send backward. You can do this with any of these objects.
6, You can now apply a drop shadow if you are saving as a jpg (not as a transparent gif). Right click after selecting at least one of your objects, click on select all objects, right click again and click on save as a single object. (If you are saving as a transparent gif, skip from here to step 9) With this single object still selected, right click and click on shadow, when the shadow window opens, check the box called shadow, change the X and Y offsets to 5, make sure the first shadow type box is highlighted and the color is black. Click on OK. If you are making a transparent gif, don't apply a shadow as it will also save the background color (white in this case) along with the shadow.
7, Now crop the tag by selecting the entire merged object, go to Edit>Crop, and it will crop to the size of the object. The crop icon with the selection tool won't work for this, you have to use the Edit>Crop command.
8. You can now either fill the background or save as a transparent gif or png. To fill the background, make sure none of your objects are selected, go to edit, fill and fill the background with the color or gradient of your choice You can reduce the transparency by either changing the transparency when you fill or by filling again after the first fill with a white fill or a color to match your gradient, and reducing the transparency on this second fill. The transparency is set right in the fill window, at the bottom right. Right click and merge all. If you like, you can buttonize the tag by going to your easy palette, button gallery, any shape. Just double click the style you like, and it will apply. If you don't like it, click the undo button on the toolbar and try another one. See below to one I have buttonized. You're done! Save as a jpg or png.
l hope you had fun! Back to top
Other Examples
Same flower and butterfly as above, Font for name is STOMP Sui Generis	Street Humouresque font for name; Japanese Design: G; butterflips: e	Street Humouresque font for name; Japanese Design: M; butterflips: e
Subpear font for name, Japanese Design: H, duplicated once and 2nd one flipped horizontally; butterflips: c	Same as the one to the left but buttonized using button style A29 from Easy Palette	A square instead of a circle, Font for name is Sunflower 4, Japanese Design: K; butterflips: l (that's an L, lower case)
If you have any questions or suggestions, click on the email button below to contact me. 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. ©2003-2010 Ellie's Treasures The North Face

Back to top Webpage Design Information This webpage background was made in PhotoImpact with a tutorial by Deb DeHaven Sadly, she passed away and her site is gone. The font I used for the text on the buttons is BrockScript The font I used for the tutorial header is AC3 Butterfly. Click on the font name to download the font. I use PhotoImpact to make all of my headers due to the amazing 3D text it has and the wonderful presets available free online Most of the presets I use are either the ones that come with PhotoImpact, usually the Gel ones, or from Deb's PI Tutorials and More (see below) or Carol Oyl's site This is the address to Deb's old pages http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/millenit/1716/pitutorials/objects/presets/presets1.html I can't find any links to her new pages but the presets are still on this page for download. For more sites to find PI Presets, take a look at my Great Beginnings page.