In the Blink of an Eye By Jean Brotherton We are going to explore how to combine two sets of animation on the same tag. You will need intermediate PSP skills including use of plug ins and some experience of Animation Shop. Materials A scene with a lake and animal Choice of Mask Almathera Plug OK - Let's begin! Open a New Transparent Raster Layer 550 x 500 Flood fill with a dark colour from your tube I used 2a547e - On a new raster layer, flood fill with a light colour from your tube - I used c0e6fd. Effects / Texture effects / Texture / Canvas simple (Corel_15_015) setting as per the screen shot below: Layers / New Mask Layer / From Image - find the mask Gabee Mask 1 settings as screen shot below: Layers Merge / Merge Group and you should now have something like this: On your merged layer, select your magic wand and click inside of the blue background until you get marching ants around the inner frame. Copy and past your tube into the selected area. Selections None, Layers Merge Visible. Add your watermark. Now we have completed the basic tag - now for the effects - Blinking the deer's eye and moving the water. Duplicate the merged layer twice making a total of three layers. Rename the two new layers as follows - Open and Closed. You should now have the following. On the Closed layer Zoom In and activate your freehand selection tool and outline the deer's eye Layer / New Raster Layer - Select a colour that roughly matches the deer I chose 848488. Floodfill now Note: If you need to activate your raster deform tool to pull the eye more into shape make sure you are on the same layer as above. Close off the merged layer and open layers, merge visible the remaining 2 layers and rename closed. You should now have 3 layers, merged, open closed. Select None. We are now going to choose the area of water we would like to animate. On the Merged layer select your freehand selection tool (lasso) with settings as follows Freehand / Replace / Feather 7/ Smoothing 4 / Anti Alias Checked. Roughly go around the area that you want to select - it does not have to be accurate as we have the feather on to soften the edges. It should look similar to this: Still on the Merged layer Effects / Plug Ins / Almathera / Pond with the following settings Move on to your Layer named Open and apply the Almathera Puddle Pond again with the same settings except alter the scale to 23 Move onto your layer named Closed and repeat except alter the scale to 31. Selections None Now we are ready to move across to Animation Shop. Starting with the merged layer first copy and paste into AS. Then copy the open layer and paste after current frame and finally the closed layer. Alter the animation speed to about 65 - if you are using a different image then your settings may be different. Finally re-size down to 450 x 409 Save as Gif and optimize. I hope that you've enjoyed this tutorial! Copyright 2008 Jean Brotherton Written for the Le Cafe D'Amis Group. All Rights Reserved.