By Jan Smith
HavABandit@aol.com
If you're going to share this tutorial please keep my name attached to it.
*Each frame has my watermark added to it in a different place to prevent theft.*
I didn't create the image, my work is only in the animation of it.
This tutorial assumes that you have a basic working knowledge of PSP.
First you need a picture that you want to animate. You can nab this one by right clicking on it and saving it to your hard drive as a jpg.
I've already added a frame to it but you can cut that frame out and use your own. If you're going to do an animation that you want a frame on, have your basic picture and put a frame around it to begin with, then work from there. Copy and paste your image for a total of 6 frames. Keep each open in PSP but you'll only work on one at a time.
You'll need a bird to fly into her hand. You're welcome to nab the one below.
You're going to need to tube it in PSP so that you can animate it.
Make sure to save your original tubed bird.
After tubing the bird, you need to move his wings to make it appear as if he's flying. Take your lasso tool and go around his wing as shown in the above image.
Click edit, then cut and you'll have this.
Click on selections, then select none to get rid of the ants. Now click edit, paste as a new layer
The cut part of the wing needs to be on it's own layer so that you can move it as needed. Click on your deformation tool and rotate the wing and bring it into the body of the bird. Save each bird that you make as a tube so that you can add them to your main image. When you've moved the wing, remember to merge visible layers and save it as a tube.
Here you see the wing moved in a downward position.
Now do the other wing in the same manner.
Repeat the step above with the deformation tool to move the other wing and save it as a tube.
Now you're ready to add your tubed birds to your main images. Remember the perspective of a bird coming toward you. It needs to start out smaller and grow larger as it gets closer to you.
Put your tubed bird on your first image up in the corner, go to image, resize, and reduce the size of the bird, then merge your layers. I save each image as a psp file. When you do that, make sure that your layers are merged. Now get the other bird that you've tubed and put it in the next image. One of your tubes will show the wings up and the other tube will show them down. You need to make sure that you have them in order so the bird appears to fly smoothly. This bird needs to be a bit larger than the first bird because as it comes toward you, it will appear larger. See below
Keep adding your bird tubes until it reaches her hand and remember to resize the birds as it gets closer to the woman. When the bird reaches her hand, you can use your push tool set on 1 to add it's legs but this isn't necessary if you're not comfortable with that tool.
If you want to add sparkles, put them on all images randomly so that it looks like it's twinkling.
When you have all of your images ready, open animation shop. Run the animation wizard and put your images in there in order. I started mine off with an image of the woman only without the bird, but you can start it with the bird if you like.
Here's how you're going to set up the animation wizard.
Click next.
Click next.
Click next.
You can change the animation speed here. Play with different speeds to see what you like best on your image. Click next then add your psp images in the order of the bird farthest away then each one coming closer until the bird is in the hand. Click next, then click finish. Now name and save your animation.
If you've had fun with this tutorial, I'd like to see your finished work. Send it here.
If you need help with this tutorial, be prepared to send me screen shots of each step you've done.
