This is a simple tutorial on how to make dingbat lace. There are a lot of dingbats that would work great for this. I used DecoDividers, letter S for this tute. Download DecoDividers dingbat at the bottom of this page if you would like to use it. |
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1. Open a 400x400 canvas with a transparent background. This will give you plenty of room to work. 2. Flood fill with a dark color and add a layer. 3. Click on the text tool and choose which dingbat you want to use. The size will be determined somewhat by the choice of dingbat you choose, but be sure the size will leave room around the canvas when you have them all done. I used size 36 for this tute. Antialias and floating checked. 4. Place it on your canvas toward the upper left corner for now. 5. Copy and paste as a new selection one ding on the right and two dings below so it looks like the image below. These will all be on the same layer. Deselect. 6. Now copy again and paste as a new selection below the original. The copied image will be of the original four. 7. Continue this till you about have about four groups of four and deselect. Using the mover tool, move the dingbats to the center of your canvas. If you do not have much room around the edge you will want to make the canvas larger. I discovered, thanks to Suz, that if you don't leave room around the edge it won't work properly. |
These samples have been cropped and resized for faster loading.
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8. Save this in PSP format so you can use it again. Shift D to duplicate and close the original and work on the duplicate. 9. Make sure you have the lace layer selected, it should be layer 2 on your palette. 10. Go to Image/ effects/ kaleidescope to create some neat effects for your lace. For this image below all my settings were at 0 except petals which are noted by the image below. Erase any stray pieces of the dingbat on the edges. |
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12. You can make these lace pieces into tubes by resizing, (image/ resize) and deleting layer 1( the colored layer) and exporting as a tube. 13. You can also make these into more elaborate lace patterns by using the same method you just learned. |
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The best way to add a shadow to these to place them on a new layer with no selection. Then place your shadow. Each one you make will be really unique, I know you'll have fun doing this, I did. :) |