Baby It's Cold Outside By Pia Iren To make the above tag you need to be an advanced student familiar with plug ins and Animation Shop. Materials Alien Skin Xenofex 2 Classic Mosaic Vanderlee Snowflakes A Nice Focal Tube Snowy Window Frame available Here Nice Winter Graphic Nice Accents Open a new transparent image 800 x 600 Open your focal tube and select two colours from the tube. From these make a gradient with Style linear, Angle 45, Repeats, 5 and Invert checked. Flood fill your background with the gradient and then Adjust Blur - Gaussian blur - 40% Open your window tube and copy and paste as a new layer. Place this where you want it - I put mine up and slightly right. Select your window tube layer and click with your magic wand inside your window using your shift key so all the four windows are selected. Modify Selection - Expand - 2. Add a new layer and paste into selection. Move this layer under the window layer. Keeping the selection open add a new layer and drag it under the window layer. Now duplicate this layer until you have 3 blank layers. Close the top two blank layers. Highlight the open blank layer. Effects - Plug ins - VDL Adrenaline - Snowflakes with the following settings: Then close off this layer and open the second blank layer and select it. Use the same settings but change the random seed to 96 Close off the second layer and open the top blank layer. Use the same settings but change the random seed to 100 Close the layer. Select None Add drop shadow to the window frame layer with the following settings: Open your focal tube and copy and paste as a new layer - drag to the top and re-size if necessary - I wanted mine facing the other way so I used mirror. Apply drop shadow using the same settings as above. I thought a soft look would be nicer so I chose an blue colour Now we are going to make the frame Select all - Modify selection - Select Selection Border - Both sides Border with 20 and anti-alias checked. Open a new layer and flood fill with a nice gradient set on linear 45% and repeat 1 Effects Plug-ins Xenofex 2 - Classic Mosaic with the following settings: Image Canvas Size 820Wide 520 High and select the middle diamond. Select All - Select Modify Contract 10 - Selections Invert On a new layer flood fill with a silver gradient or pattern and Add Noise Gaussian Monochrome Ticked 40 Select None Add drop Shadow as Screen Shot 1 and then apply again changing the Horizontal and Vertical to -2 Image Canvas Size 870Wide 620 High and select the middle diamond. Select All - Modify Contract 25 - Selections Invert On a new layer flood fill with the same gradient that you used for the first part of the frame but set repeat to 3 Effects Xenofex 2 Classic Mosaic again but change Random Seed to 1034. Select None Add drop Shadow as in previous step. Still on the top layer pick a nice font and type in your text and place under the window and add drop shadow as per Screen Shot 2 Add your watermark. We are now ready to go onto the animation part Still with your top layer selected open the bottom snowy layer. Copy merged and paste into AS as new animation. Back to PSP and close the first snowy layer and open the second snowy layer. Copy merged and paste into AS after the current frame. Back to PSP yet again and close the second snowy layer and open the third snowy layer copy and paste into AS after the second frame. Then Edit - Select All - Frame Properties - set at 20 Animation re-size to 450 x 347 Save as (your file name) and the optimization wizard will automatically run. Congratulations! You have made your snowy animation. Copyright 2008 Pia Iren Written for the Le Cafe D'Amis Group. All Rights Reserved.