This tutorial was written for PSP 6 and Animation Shop 2 from Jasc.com. But if you're using PSP 7 and Animation Shop 3 you'll also be able to follow it. All the functions are there, they might just have moved a bit.

The tutorial is very basic, so even newbies at PSPro and AS should be able to follow it. It is also a long tutorial, but don't let that discourage you, you'll learn lots of functions in both PSP and AS. And when you've learned this tutorial, you'll be able to apply variations yourself.

First you need to download a tube. The tube is from this site but I am offering it for download here to make things easier (permission is given of the site of the creator). Unzip the tube and export to your tubes folder.

I've used a nice script font for this tutorial, but you can really use any font that you like.

1. Open PSP and start a new image. Set the size to about 300 pixels width and 200 pixels height, 16 mill colours, and the background to transparent. If the image is too big, we can always make it smaller afterwards. You now have a rectangle with white and grey squares on it. This is the canvas.

2. Go to the right, find the two coloured squares, hold your mouse over the top one and right click. Choose other. In the palet that shows up you should choose a medium golden like yellow (now we're making the name exactly like I did, but you can make it in different colours if you like). Press ok. The square has now changed colour to the yellow that you chose.

3. Now go to the toolbar to the left. Choose the texttool . Hold the mourse pointer somwhere over the canvas and left click. Now you can edit the text that you want to enter. Under names, choose the name of the font that you want to use. Set the font size to an appropriate size. Make the text bold if you think it looks better like that. To the right you make sure that the Antialias box is NOT checked. Make sure you've chosen 'crate as vector' to the right. For the colour make sure you use the yellow one that we chose before, you do that by leftclicking the yellow square that is showing, and last, type the name that you want to animate. Press ok.

4. The name will now show up somewhere on the canvas. It might not look right, but you can move it. Move your mouse pointer over the name, to the center square (the small ones you can see on top of the name), hold down the left mouse key and move the name to where you want it to be. The top left corner would be my choise, pretty close to the edge, but still a few pixels off it.

5. On the top tool bar, go to layers>merge>visible. The name should now appear without the lines around it, but still on a transparent background.

6. Now, on the top toolbar, choose selections>select all. You can now see ants marching all the way around the canvas.

7. Go to the left toolbar and choose the selections tool and left click somewhere within the selection. The ants should now be marching only around the name itself.

8. Now for a bit more fun. Go to the top tool bar and choose image>effects>inner bevel. A box will appear with lots of options.

This is a screencapture of that box. On it you can see all the settings that I used. Make sure you get a nice yellow colour, by rightclicking the colour square and choosing a yellow colour just like we've done before. When you're satisfied with the result you can save the setting on 'save as' and give it a name that you will recognize. This is so you can use it on another occasion. When you're finished with these settings, just choose ok.

9. You still have the ants marching around the name. Right click somewhere on the canvas and they will disappear, and you'll see how the letters have changed and now look a bit more like gold. The gold effect is not always perfect, but it's still better than just plain yellow, don't you think?

10. Now we're going to crop the image. That means, we're going to resize it, so it isn't too big. On the left toolbar choose the crop tool . Place it in the top left corner of the canvas, hold down the left mouse button, and pull it downwards and to the right, until the name is inside a nice rectangle that gives it the same space to all sides. Not too much but still it should not touch the sides. Here's what mine looks like:

You might give yours just a little more space than I did, because mine didn't turn out perfect. Now douple clik inside the little rectangle, and the canvas should immediately be the size of it, and the rest disappears.

11. And now to the hard work. Erasing the name bit by bit to make the writing effect. First save the image you have now. File>save as. Just name it 01.psp, that will make things easier. I save it right on the desktop so it's easy to find. And you won't need to keep it when the animation is finished, so there is no reason to save it in a special folder.

12. Now go to the left toolbar and choose the eraser . Go to the tool options window and choose these settings:

13. Now think about how you would write this name with this font and then start erasing it in a backwards form. A little bit at a time and saving every time you've erased a bit. Not too much and not too little. If it's too hard to see, you might want to use the magnifying glass to make the image bigger. This is how much I erased for the first bit:

14. Then saved it as 02.psp. Then I erased a bit more, like this:

15. And saved it as 03.psp. You just go on like this until there is nothing left but one little dot where the first letter in the name begins. That is the last image you save. This will all take you a while, but remember that when animating it makes a nice effect. I used 29 savings for my name, if you have a longer name it will be more, of course. But it's always a balance between wanting to make the animation look good and not having a too big filesize. As you erase, always remember to do it in the direct opposite mode as you would when writing the name, that will make the nicest effect.

16. Now you can shut down PSP and open up Animation Shop.

17. On the tool bar choose the Animation Wizard . When prompted, answer "Same size as the first image frame", next, "Transparent" (the colour doesn't matter), next, "Upper left corner of the frame", next, "Yes, repeat animation indefinitely", and set the display time to 10, next, "Add image". Now find the images on the deskptop that you saved previously, just hold down control an add them all, the order is not important right now. When all the filenames appear in the small window you can go about setting them in the right order. I put 1 on top and 29 on the bottom. Just do it in the same order. Make sure they're in the right order, then next and then Complete.

18. Now you can see them all in a line in the progran. Push ctrl+a, they are all marked with blue around them now.

19. Go to the top toolbar and choose animation>reverse frames. Now they are in the right order for playing the animation.

20. You can do that by choosing View animation . Just close it with the x in the top right corner when you've finished wieving. We now have an animated name, that appears to be written by an invisible person. This is what mine looks like:

21. But you want the sparks, don't you? So we have to work harder. Right click the first frame so it's the only one with blue around it.

22. Go to the top tool bar, file>run paint shop pro. Go back to animation shop with psp running in the background.

23. In the toolbar choose "export frames to paint shop pro". The first frame from the animation will now appear inside psp. You can enlargen it to see what you're working with. There should be a litte dot where the first letter should begin.

24. Now on the left toolbar choose the Picture Tube tool (15th from the top). Go to the tool options window and choose these settings:

Choose the tube with the name you need and set the scale according to the tubes size. Above are the settings I used. But you should experiment a little to see what you like the best. I have the scale just a little too small for my taste.

25. Now, with the tubes tool, click once on the little dot in the frame. A spark should appear. (If you want several sparks in each frame you click several times).

26. Now choose the arrowtool , right click the canvas once, and choose "Update back to animation shop". Then you can close the canvas and go back to animation shop to see what it looks like.

27. There is now a spark in one of the frames. You do the same with the rest of the frames, except for the last one, we'll come to that one later. I just export all the frames at the same time, but it might be easier to keep the overwiev if you do it one at a time. The settings for the tube will stay the same until you change them, so you don't have to worry about that every time.

28. All the frames except the last one should now have sparks. You can check this in Animation Shop by looking at them one by one, if one doesn't have a spark, just export to PSP, add the spark and then update. And now for the last frame.

29. Click to highlight it, so it has the blue and red frame around it. Go to the tools bar and choose 'Duplicate'. You should now have two identical frames.

30. Mark the first one, export and add the spark. Leave the last one without the spark. You can now shut down PSP.

31. Mark the last frame and right click it once. Choose properties and set the delay time to 300, choose ok. Now wiev the animation to make sure it looks ok. I should look something like the ones on the bottom of this page, only with the checkered background in Animation Shop.

32. Now you must save it. But that is also a complicated matter with this animation since the sparks are partly transparent. We want to be able to use it both on a white and on a black background, so we'll save it in two versions.

33. First the one for the white background. Choose file>save as. Name it and just save it right on the desktop so you'll be able to find it easily. You can always move it later. Choose cutomize. On the 'partial transparency' tap choose "yes, blend with this colour" and then make sure that colour is white by right clicking and choosing white. Leave the other options as the standard. Press ok, next, next and complete. Your animtion has now been saved so it can be used on a white background.

34. But we want it for a black background as well. Therefore, go to the tool bar and undo . Now save it again, with another name so as not to save over the first one, and when choosing the colour just choose black in stead of white. You can now shut down AS, delete all the unwanted files on your desktop and start admiring your animations!

This is what my animation looks like, on white and on black:

(This entire tutorial © 2001 by Guðrun Jacobsen)