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Good evening, class!
It's always evening in this classroom, because that's when I do my homework too.
I'm Bonita Shealy. I've cleaned teeth in Greenville, South Carolina, for twenty-two
years, and I am not an artist. I want that understood right up front. I can't draw a
horse. What I can do is follow directions one careful step at a time, which is most of
what a hygienist does all day, and it turns out that's most of what Paint Shop Pro wants
from you too.
Here's how I got into this. I bowl Thursday nights with the Spare Parts in the ladies'
league out on Pleasantburg Drive, and last fall our league secretary, Joyce Colvin, got
the league a home page. It had the standings and the schedule and it was very nice, but
the buttons were plain blue underlined words, and Joyce asked at the lanes one night if
anybody knew how to make "real buttons, the shiny kind." Nobody raised a hand. So I did.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
My husband Ronald found Paint Shop Pro 5 on a CD-ROM stuck to the front of a computer
magazine. I spent the thirty-day trial making the ugliest buttons in the state of South
Carolina, and somewhere around day twenty-five they got good. The league page has eleven
of my buttons on it now. Opal Gebhart, who has bowled a 212, says they're the best thing
about it, and Opal does not say things she doesn't mean.
Then the ladies on my team started asking how I did it, and then their husbands did,
and then a man from Spartanburg I've never laid eyes on e-mailed to ask, and I figured I'd
better write it all down one time and be done. So this is my classroom. The lessons are
for real beginners, the kind of beginner I was last October: you know where the mouse is,
you can find a file after you've saved it, and that's about it. If you already know what
a layer is, you're too advanced for me, and I mean that kindly.
Getting Paint Shop Pro 5
Paint Shop Pro is shareware, from a company called Jasc Software. That means
you can try the whole program free for thirty days before you pay for it, and after that
you're on your honor to register it or quit using it. You can download it, but it's a big
download, and on a modem you'll want to start it before supper and check on it after the
dishes. A lot of my students got theirs off a magazine CD like I did.
It's a Windows program. If you have a Macintosh, I'm sorry, but I've never touched one
and I'd only lead you astray.
Version 5 comes with a second program called Animation Shop, for pictures that
move. We won't use it in these lessons, but it's in there, and when you're ready for it,
I'll send you to the right teacher at the end of Lesson 3.
The screen, in plain words
The first time I opened Paint Shop Pro I sat there for ten minutes afraid to click
anything. Here's what everything is, so you don't have to.
The menus
along the top |
File, Edit and View are like any other program. The three that matter to us are the
Image menu, where the effects live (bevels, shadows, and a lot of things you'll
want to try at midnight and shouldn't), the Colors menu, where you decide how many
colors your picture gets to keep and which one turns invisible, and the
Selections menu, where you let go of what you've selected. |
The toolbar
under the menus |
A row of little pictures that are shortcuts for menu choices. Hold the mouse still over
any one of them and a little yellow tag pops up to tell you what it does. |
The Tool Palette
down the left |
A column of little tools. We use three: the selection tool (a dotted
rectangle), the flood fill (a paint can pouring), and the text tool (a
letter A). Leave the rest alone until you've finished all three lessons. |
The Color Palette
down the right |
A block of rainbow with two overlapping squares under it. The front square is your
foreground color and the one behind it is your background color. Click the
rainbow with the left mouse button to change the foreground, with the right button to
change the background. |
The settings window
floating |
A small window with the settings for whatever tool you've picked. If it disappears,
don't panic. It's hiding, and the View menu will bring it back. |
The status bar
along the bottom |
When your pointer is over your picture, this tells you exactly where you are, counted
in dots across and dots down, and how big the whole picture is. In Lesson 2 those numbers
matter. |
CLASSROOM RULES
(Read these. They're on the test.)
1. Save often. File menu, Save, or hold down Ctrl and press S. While you work,
save in Paint Shop Pro's own kind of file, the one that ends in .psp. It keeps
everything you need to change your mind later. The GIF for your page gets made at the very
end, in Lesson 3.
2. Keep the original. Before you try anything you're not sure about, use Save
As and give it a new name: home1, home2, home3. Disk space is cheap. Starting over at
eleven o'clock at night is not.
3. One effect at a time. Put on one effect, look at it, and decide. If you
hate it, go to the Edit menu and choose Undo, or hold down Ctrl and press Z. If you pile
on three effects and then hate it, you won't know which one to blame. It's like flossing:
it only works if you do it every single time.
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About the pictures in this classroom
I'd love to show you a picture of every screen, but a snapshot of a whole computer
screen makes a huge file, and most of my students are on 28.8 modems like I am. So I
describe every step in words, menu by menu. When it helps, I'll show you a finished piece
that somebody else made and put here on GeoCities.us, so you can see the kind of result
you're aiming for.
Here are two buttons from the
GeoCities.us clip art library:
Look closely at the edges. The top and left edges are a shade lighter than the
middle, and the bottom and right edges are a shade darker. That's a bevel, and it's
what makes a flat rectangle look like something you could press with your finger. By the
end of Lesson 2 you'll know how to make that edge.
And here's what a beveled button looks like when somebody who really knows what he's
doing gets hold of one:
These chrome capsules, with the little ringed planet and the navy lettering, are
from Dustin Mayfield's free space graphics set,
STARPORT. His Flight Rules say any
non-commercial home page may use them as long as it links back to Starport, so I wrote and
told him where they landed, and you'll find them as the Home and Next buttons at the
bottom of every lesson, with a link back to him under them. Don't expect chrome in Lesson
2. Dustin explains how he does it in his
Flight Manual (a gradient with a
sudden dark band where the horizon would be), and that's graduate school. We're still in
the first grade.
The lessons
| 1 |
Your First Button
A new picture, a flood fill and a word on it, with soft-edged lettering. About thirty
minutes. Homework: a matching set of three. |
| 2 |
Bevels and Drop Shadows
Making your button stand up off the page, and why the light always comes from the
upper left. About forty-five minutes, more if you can't stop fiddling. |
| 3 |
Saving for the Web
Cutting down the colors, see-through backgrounds, and when a JPEG is better than a
GIF. The lesson everybody skips and then writes to me about. |
Do them in order. Each one picks up right where the last one left off.
Turning in homework
You don't have to, but I love it. E-mail me your button (attach the GIF) or the
address of the page it's on, and I'll write back with a grade. Everybody who turns it in
gets an A. Forty-one students have so far, from nineteen states and one lady in Ontario
who makes buttons for her church.
Questions are welcome too. Put the lesson number in the subject line so I can find it
fast. I answer on Monday and Wednesday nights. Thursdays I'm bowling.
You are student number
   
since class started in February 1999
[email protected]
Last updated Sunday, September 19, 1999
Chrome buttons from STARPORT by Dustin Mayfield ·
88x31 buttons from the GeoCities.us clip art library
© 1999 Bonita Shealy
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