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Incised Decorations with Dingbats

 

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This tutorial will show how to use a certain type of dingbat to create an incised look using PSP and BladePro.  For this tutorial, I use the letter Q from Davy's Dingbats.

 

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This is an interesting dingbat which looks too plain, as is.   If you just Blade Pro it, it makes a nice decoration, but its still sort of "light weight".

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Obtain a selection which is the outline of the above dingbat.  Methods for doing this differ and often vary with the dingbat, so no general rule can be given.  Feather this selection by a pixel or so to smooth things out when applying Blade Pro.  Save the selection to the alpha channel.  Make sure that it is filled with some color.

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Open another image of the same size, and lay down the same dingbat, but now use anti-aliasing.  I used a black type on a white background.  You may want to try other things in order to get some more variation in the grey levels.  I haven't explored all of the options, yet.  Save this image as a bitmap, and put it in the environments and textures folder used by Blade Pro.

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Now, apply the desired Blade Pro preset to the original selection, but use the above bitmap for the texture (bump map).  This takes some fiddling to get what you want.  You need to adjust both the size slider and position of the bitmap in order to get things to overlay.  If you don't have good control with your mouse or pen and a lot of patience, don't even bother.  <GGG>

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Here is the result of my first attempt at this technique.  I used the basic gold preset, but with the bitmap generated above, rather than the blank.  The size was around 56 and I just had to slide it around to look right.  I think the texture level was about 30-40.  I pulled back on the reflection level, and jacked up the tarnish.  I got good results using the "chrome" environment, as well.

 

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.moony-3.jpg (4045 bytes)Any comments are appreciated.  Contact me via e-mail.
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This page was last modified on 09/09/98 09:44 AM CDT