Pixel's Web Works Gold Leaf Twist Tutorial

Tutorial For This Page's Side Border
Download the entire tutorial for offline viewing

Gold Leaf Tube zip file

Silver Bar Tube zip file

Installing and using PSP5 picture tubes;
Creating images with multiple layers:
Moving layers around in a different stacking order to control what shows on top and what shows on the bottom;
Making layers temporarily invisible;
Duplicating layers;
Merging specific layers;
Creating a seamless side border from an image.

Set your background and foreground colours to white.
Open a new file 400 x 400 with a transparent background and 16 million colours.
Open the layers tool and the controls tool. Make the layers tool narrower and longer by dragging on a corner of it. Arrange your window like this to make it easier to work. You will be working with 8 layers and it will be important to have the correct layer active.
Create a new layer. Call it Base and flood fill it with white, solid, match mode=none, tolerance=200, opacity=100.
Open the images called PIX-gold-leaf.tub and PIX-silver-bar.tub. In the next steps we will install these images as tubes.
Left click once on the image called PIX-gold-leaf.tub to make it the active image.
From the menu, select File | Export Tube. A new window will pop up. Change the settings to across=1 down=1 Step size=100 placement=random, and name it PIX-gold-leaf.
Left click once on the image called PIX-silver-bar.tub to make it the active image.
From the menu, select File | Export Tube. A new window will pop up. Change the settings to across=1 down=1 step size=100 placement=random, and name it PIX-silver-bar.
Close the gold leaf and silver bar images. You will be working from the tube files from now on.
Open a new layer. Call it Left 1. Make sure it is the active layer. It is active when the layer button for it looks pressed in on the layers control window. We will be creating several layers of left facing leaves and several layers of right facing leaves, so it will be important to call the layers as they are in the tutorial. It will also be important to make sure the correct layer is active for each step.
Left click once on the picture tubes tool in the tools toolbar. It looks like a paint brush with blue thumbtack on it. A new window will open that allows you to select which picture tube to use.
Select PIX-gold-leaf at 100%.
For the rest of this tutorial we will be using very precise placements of the images to make it easier to crop for a repeating pattern later. Make sure your PSP page is set up with the rulers showing on the left and top sides of an image. For this particular pattern it was just luck that the image turned out to be 100 pixels high, so it is easy to calculate where to place each leaf. For other images you should turn on the grid and place images lined up evenly with grid lines. The nice thing about having each leaf or flower or whatever you use on it's own layer is that you can move it around without disturbing other parts of the total image.
With the PIX-gold-leaf tube selected, and the layer called Left 1 active, move the mouse to position 100 horizontal and 300 vertical. Left click once and a gold leaf will appear.
Create a new layer called Left 2 and make sure it is active.
Move the mouse to position 100 horizontal and 200 vertical. Left click once and a gold leaf will appear.
Create a new layer called Left 3 and make sure it is active.
Move the mouse to position 100 horizontal and 100 vertical. Left click once and a gold leaf will appear. Now is a good time to save your work. Save it as a .psp file. Your picture should now look like this:
Create a new layer called Right 1 and make sure it is active.
Move the mouse to position 300 horizontal and 250 vertical. Left click once and a gold leaf will appear. The left facing leaf will be at the right side of your image.
With the layer called Right 1 active, in the menu select Image | Mirror. A mirrored image will appear, with the leaf facing right. Under normal circumstances you would have to move the right facing leaf to the correct position. Originally I placed the leaf at 100 horizontal and 250 vertical, then mirrored it and had to move it back to it's original position. The math on placing images doesn't always work out as clean as it did for this border. Your image should now look like this:
Create a new layer called Right 2 and make sure it is active.
Move the mouse to position 300 horizontal and 150 vertical. Left click once and a gold leaf will appear. The left facing leaf will be at the right side of your image.
With the layer called Right 1 active, in the menu select Image | Mirror. A mirrored image will appear, with the leaf facing right.
Save your work in .psp format.
Create a new layer and call it Bar.
In the controls window, select the tube called PIX-silver-bar at 100%.
Place your mouse at position 300 horizontal 200 vertical. This will place the bar to the right of the twisted leaves.
If you did things in the right order, the bar layer should be at the top of the stack of layers. It needs to be moved down between the layers of right and left facing leaves. Left click on the layer called bar and drag it so it ends up between the layers called Right 1 and Left 3. You may have to drag it a couple of times to get it to snap into the right position. Your layers tool should now look like this. It is very important to have the layers in the order shown, or the leaves won't appear to be twisting up the bar.
Left click once on the mover tool. Make sure the layer called bar is active. Left click on the bar and drag it to the left until it is positioned between the layers of twisted leaves. Save your work in .psp format. Your image should now look like this:
Save another copy of your work using Save As or Save Copy As. This will make sure you have one completed image in case something goes wrong in the next steps.
In the next steps we will merge the leaves and bars layers so we can work with them as a single unit.
Make the layers called Layer 1 and Base invisible. To do this, for each of those layers, in the Layers Control tool, left click once on the layer visibility toggle (the little red/green/blue bar picture just to the right of the layer name). This button temporarily hides layers. The coloured button will turn to an empty grey rectangle, and your picture will have a temporarily transparent background. Your work area should look like this:
From the menu, choose Layers | Merge | Merge Visible. All the leaves and bar layers will be merged into one layer called Merged, and that layer will be active.
Now we will make a complete copy of the image and place it to the left of the original image. In the Layers Control Tool, right click once on the layer called Merged. From the window that opens select Duplicate. A new layer called Copy of Merged will appear. You won't see the new layer because it is placed directly above the layer called Merged.
With the layer called Copy of Merged active, from the menu choose Image | Mirror. A mirrored image will appear to the right of the first image.
Left click once on the mover tool. Make sure the layer called Copy of Merged is active. Place your mouse over the right image at position 300 horizontal and 200 vertical. Left click and drag the image to position 50 horizontal and 200 vertical. It is very important to make sure the image coordinates are correct. You need the image to be placed exactly in line with the first image, so that when you make the image into a repeatable border the repeats on both images are the same. Your image should now look like this:
Make the layers called Layer1 and Base visible again by pressing on the layers visibility button for each layer in the layers control tool. The white background should be showing again.
Save the file in .psp format. We're now ready to crop the image and make it into a border.
Double click on the rectangular selection tool in the toolbar. A new window will open to allow you to specify coordinates. Set the values to left=15 right=200 top=100 bottom=200. For this image it was easy to determine the coordinates because we used precise placements of the gold leaves, and we know they are 100 pixels high. For other images you will have to look for the best place to crop for a repeat.
A portion of your image should now have a marquee around it, as in the image below.
From the menu select Image | Crop to Selection. Your image will be cropped down to everything inside the marquee.
Now it's time to merge all the layers and make it into a border. From the menu select Layers | Merge | Merge All.
From the menu select Image | Add Borders. Change the settings to top=0 bottom=0 left=0 right=1000. This will add 1000 pixels to the right, using the background colour in the colour palette. With the 200 pixels in the image, the total of 1200 pixels wide is ample enough to cover an SVGA screen without repeating the border. Your image should look like this.
Save the image as a .jpg file. It is now ready to use as a background.