Carve a Pumpkin in PSP

Page One
Tutorial by "Eagle"

An easy tutorial by Eagle. The presentation of instructions is bare and to the point.

Here are some samples of what you can achieve with this tutorial. See more samples at: My Pumpkin Patch (Opens in a new window.)

Instructions

If you are using Internet Explorer, hold your left mouse down on the pumpkin image on the right and drag it to your PSP workspace and let go of the mouse. The image will open. You can also save the image to your computer and open it in PSP.

1.  Promote Background layer:  Layers/Promote Background Layer

2.  Your Pumpkin is now ready to carve. Select a stencil from here

3.  Save the stencil to your computer and open it in PSP or in IE drag the stencil onto the workspace.

4.  The stencils are .gif's and will need to have the colors increased...Image/Increase Color Depth/16 million colors.

5.  On the pumpkin image, we are going to select the area where the stencil will be. Using the Selection tool - ellipse or circle, select the area to be carved.

You can also use the Freehand tool set to Freehand and draw your own area. This is good to use when you are using a part of a pumpkin in a pile.

Draw your area and leave selected - do not deselect. The marching ants will be around the area.

6.  Go to the stencil.

There are 2 methods I use for this next step, depending on their esults. The first is to use the Magic Wand to select all the white, on-stencil part. Then Selection/Invert to have the lines selected. you can use the tolerance to include more shades.

The second is to select the lines. With the magic wand - Tolerance set to 50 (tolerance may need to be increased for some stencils that are not totally black lines), select the black of the stencil. Hold down the Shift key and click on all the black areas.

7.  Click on Edit/Copy then Edit/Paste/Paste As New Image to see if you have it all selected. If so, close that test screen and then right click on the top bar of the pumpkin image and choose Paste/Paste Into Selection.

The selected black lines of your stencil will be inside the area you selected on your pumpkin.

Save as .pspimage often. Save your work as cut1.pspimage.

8.  You now have the stencil still selected and ready to fill.

Set your colors to black.

Flood Fill.

Click anywhere inside the black filled stencil.

Variations  We will do a few fill variations. First a simple candle glow.

Set your Styles Foreground - gradient
I used the Autumn Gradient - Style - Sunburst

In the gradient dialogue, click on Edit. I edited the gradient by pulling all of the colors to the left. On the first edit bar - drag the color markers below the bar and the color diamonds above the color bar to the left, eliminating most of the dark colors.

With the Flood fill,left click in the selection.

Do not deselect. It should be floating.

You could stop at this point.

Hit Ctrl+D to deselect and Save as .jpg.

But we are going to continue adding a cutout. If you deselected already, just hit Undo.

With the filled area still selected, go to Effects/3D Effects/Cutout and use these settings.

     Hit Ctrl+D to deselect.

     Save as .jpg

Copyright © 2003-2004 Michele Wills. All Rights Reserved