Making Glitters #1

This tutorial will show you how easy it is. Before we get started, please note that this tutorial was made using Paint Shop Pro 8, but will work just about the same with any paint program. You will need Animation Gallery, however. You can get either of these programs from Corel by clicking here.

Choosing Your Glitter
To start off, you're going to need glitter, aren't you? You can choose from a wide range of glitter by clicking the link above labelled "Glitter Backgrounds". Once you find the one you want to use, right click on it and select "save background as" to save it to your computer.

Step 1 - Open a New Image
Open your paint program, and open a new image, 600 wide by 400 height, transparent background. This will give us more than enough room for the text. Don't worry about the extra space, we'll crop it once we've decided on the font and have the text in place.

Step 2 - Pick Your Font
One of the key ingredients to a good looking glitter is to make the font unique, and to make it match the text you're planning on using. It doesn't make much sense to use heartland font to make a glitter that says "simply evil", now does it? To choose from a wide range of fonts, visit FontFreak. For this tutorial, I"ll be using a font called "boombox". You can find it for download on my fonts page. Once you've decided on your font, continue to step 3.

Step 3 - Setting Font Colors
Choose your font, and set your foreground and background colors to black. Once you're more advanced, you'll want to experiment with how to glitter the text, and will want to add glitter to just the border or outline, or to the filled section with a different outline, but for your first time, we'll be making the whole text glitter, so you'll want both the foreground and the background colors to be the same. This is assuming we even use the foreground color during this tutorial. Depending on what text you choose, if the letters are too thin, you'll want to add an outline of a couple of pixels to widen the letters. This is why the foreground color has to match the background color.

Step 4 - Adding The Text
Set your font to a size large enough to be noticeable. I'm using Boombox font at size 48. Now type the word you want the glitter to be. If you're keeping up, you should now have a black word on a much too large image space.

Step 4 - Crop The Image
Using your crop tool, cut the image down to the size of the text. What you see below is where you should be at, but with your own word of course.

Step 5 - Starting The Glitter
Now is when the real fun begins, the actual animating. Open Animation Shop, and under File, open the glitter gif that you saved to your computer. When it opens, you'll notice it has a couple of frames, usually 3. We'll be moving these to your paint program to add them to your text. For this tutorial, I'll be using this glitter.

When I open it in Animation Gallery, however, it looks like this:

Right click on frame 1 and select "copy", then move back to your paint program and select "paste as new image". Return to Animation Gallery, right click on frame 2 and select "copy", then paste it into your paint program. Continue this until all frames are in your paint program. Most glitters are only 3 frames, but the odd one may be 5 or 6.

Step 5 - Adding The Glitter
In paint, set your background color to "pattern", and select frame 1 of your glitter. Use the fill bucket to fill each letter of your text with this glitter. Now, we have an image that looks like this:

Right click on this image and select "copy merged", and paste it into animation gallery. Return to your paint program, and undo the step you just did, clicking "undo" until you once again have plain black letters. Then, go to your background color properties and select frame 2 of the glitter in patterns. Once again, fill each letter, then copy the image. In animation, click on your glitters first frame (the one you've already brought in to animation gallery) and select "paste image after current frame". Now your glitter has two images, like this:

Return to paint, undo the fill steps, and select frame 3 of your glitter from background color properties. Once you've filled the letters, copy the image, return to animation gallery, right click on frame 2 of your glitter and select "paste image after current frame". You should now have three frames in animation gallery.

Step 5 - Animating Your Glitter
Assuming your original glitter had 3 frames, then you're done what needs to be done in paint shop, and only need to use Animation Gallery now. (If your glitter had more frames, continue the previous steps until you have one frame for your text as there are frames in the original glitter background). Technically, your glitter text IS already an animation, but we'll want to select frame rates. In the menu, under animation, select "frame properties" and set the number fairly low. For quick animations, like glitters, 10 is a good number. Make sure each frame is set at this number! Normally, Animation Gallery comes with 10 as the default frame properties.

Step 6 - Save Your Glitter
Thats it! Now save your glitter and you're done! Next time, experiment with different fonts, styles and ways of glittering the image, but now that you know the basics, all of the experimenting becomes fun and play. Enjoy!