This tutorial is for Paint Shopt Pro 7 and Animation Shop 3 from Jasc.com. It is pretty basic, so most users should be able to follow it. We will make a very simple animation, and you will leanr techniques that you will be able to build on and vary yourself. First you need to copy the graphic of the biker to your hard drive. The graphic is from The Picture Site (the site is inactive, but I have decided to keep the link as a courtesy to the owner of the graphic) and I have the explicit written permission from the owner to use it here. You save this image to your haddrive by right clicking and choosing 'save picture as...'. It might be a good idea to save it to your desktop as long as you'll be working with it.

Remember that this graphic is used for teaching purposes. It isn't public domain and we are not making a new graphic, thus the finished product will not be our copyright, not mine nor yours.

But now, let's get going!

1. Open the image up in Animation Shop.

2. Choose duplicate so you now have two identical frames. Highlight the second frame and export it to Paint Shop Pro.

3. Choose selections>select all. On the left toolbar choose the selection tool and left click somewhere on the image. There should now be marching ants around the edges of the biker and bike. Like this, only moving:

4. With the mover tool move the whole image just one pixel upwards. Choose the selection tool again, and right click. The marching ants should disappear.

5. Now use the magnifying glass to magnify the image as much as four or five times. It has to be this big, because you will have to be very precise in the next selections.

6. Choose the lasso tool on the left and in the tool options, choose these settings:

Then select an area that looks something like this with the lasso tool (select the head, but leave the neck out):

Finally, left click within the selection, so the ants move close to the selected area like this:

7. Now choose the mover tool again and move the selection down four pixels. Choose the selections tool right click within selection and marching ants should disappear.

8. Choose the dropper and left click on skin next to the mouth, so the foreground colour is the same colour as the characters skin.

9. Choose the paint brush and set the size (in tool options) to 1, and paint over the parts of the mouth that you want to disappear. I changed the mouth from this:

to this:

If you want if different you can do that too.

10. Finally choose the arrow tool , right click somewhere on the image and choose 'update back to animation shop'. You can now shut down PSP.

11. Go to Animation Shop. Highlight both frames and right click on one of them. Choose frame properties and set the display time to 15. Then choose (in the top tool bar) Animation>animation properties. On the 'looping' tab, make sure to choose the option to 'repeat the animation indefinitely'. And now all that's left is to save the animation. Make sure to choose 'save as' and give it another name than the original graphic so you still have the original.

Good luck! And here's what my animation looks like.

(This entire tutorial is © 2001 by Guðrun Jacobsen.)