How to Make Your Own BackgroundNewsgroup: Gypsy Jewels Date: Sat, Jun 9, 2001 From: Janet I began making some of my own backgrounds when I became frustrated with not finding colors to match as well as I wanted them to. The first thing you need to do is have your picture in gif format so you can work with it at gifworks. Pick the portion of the picture with the colors you want in your Background. The trick is to keep it as plain as possible and with few colors. You may start out "cropping" just a small speck no larger than 1/4 inch square from your picture. To Crop an area: Take your image to gifworks then click onFILE Click on Open IMAGE Type in the address for the background Click on FETCH Image On the next page, click on EDIT. Click on CROP. When your picture comes up you will click on the picture and an arrow will appear. Place the tip of the arrow in the UPPER LEFT portion of the part you want for your background. Hit return. It will come back up and you click in the LOWER RIGHT portion that you want for your background. Hit return again. RESIZE it to 96x96 or any size that you prefer. Next you click on EFFECTS and for this Background all I did was use oil paint for this effect. This is one that I used oil paint first and then kaliedescope - 8 facets. See Example This one I cropped a portion of the shawl after resizing left it just the way it came out. See Example This last example is another one using chalk then kaliedescope. Then I also cropped the flowers from the pic and used them for the frame. See Example Before I upload any of the backgrounds I take them to Owens Tools and put them in the background tester to see if I am going to like the way they look. If not - it's back to the drawing board. :-) Finally, I take them back and change the format back to jpg for lower bytes. Hope I was able to explain this well enough, if not I'll try to answer questions. Just have fun with it - you never know what you are going to come up with until it's done! Janet |