INTO THE NIGHT

You will need-
PSP- I used version 9
Animation Shop
Tube of choice- I used the art of Michele Lynch- you can buy her tubes from UP YOUR ART

Filters-
Eyecandy 4000- Gradient Glow.
PhotoEffex- Scanlines (can be substituted with PSP texture effects- blinds).
VM Extravaganza- Transmission.
Xenofex-Constellation (optional)

Lets begin.

Open a new image, 600x600, flood fill white.

Pick 2 colours from your tube, a light one for your foreground and a dark one for your background. Select the rectangle tool, line style solid, width 5, and draw out a fair sized rectangle, but not too big. Convert to raster layer.

Paste your tube as a new layer. Duplicate, and mirror the bottom one. Resize the top one if necessary.

On the top tube layer, apply Eyecandy-Gradient Glow- thin, width 4, colour black. Hide this layer for now.

Highlight the rectangle layer on the layer palette and select the inside of it with the magic wand tool. Selection invert. Highlight the big tube layer and press the delete key on the keyboard. Selection invert again. Merge down so the rectangle and big tube layers are now one.

Apply Photoeffex-Scanlines with these settings-

Or instead of Scanlines you can use Texture Effects-Blinds with these settings-

Select none. Apply same gradient glow as before.

Duplicate rectangle layer and apply a Gaussian Blur with a radius of 15 to the original layer. Then apply filters-VM Extravaganza-Transmission line width and offset- 4, contrast 40. Move this bottom layer over a bit so its not all hanging over to one side.

OPTIONAL SPARKLY BITS

 Highlight the layer that is below the hidden tube layer. Switch your colours around in the material palette so the light colour is now the background. Using your preset shape tool, no line width, create as vector checked- draw out any shape you like so it fits into the rectangle. I used a standard gear shape. Stretch it out a bit until you are happy with it and convert to raster layer.

Duplicate the shape layer twice so there are 3 of them.
Apply filters-Xenofex 2-Constellation with these settings-

Do that to all 3 shape layers but change the random seed of the constellation each time.
 
Unhide your tube layer, and using the eraser set on square, zoom in and erase the bits of
gradient glow and tube that hang off the bottom of the rectangle-

Add your name to the bottom of the tag using the light colour, and apply the same gradient glow as before. I used font 'Amerika' size 55. Add copyrights and watermarks and crop tag to your liking. If you haven't done any sparkly bits then merge visible and save as Jpeg or PNG, and you are finished.

Now the animation-

Make only one of your sparkly shape layers visible, x out the other two. Copy merged, and paste into animation shop as a new animation. Go back to psp, x out the visible shape layer and un-x one of the other layers. Copy merged, paste into animation shop after the first frame. Back to psp, and un-x the last layer, x out the second one. Copy merged, paste in animation shop after current frame. 

Highlight one of the frames and press Ctrl-a on the keyboard to select all the frames. Then press Alt-Enter to bring up the frame properties. Change the speed to 13.

View animation and save. And we're done!

I wrote this tutorial on the 5th of September 2007.

Webset © Kenickie84