 |
Animated Christmas cards
With Christmas just around the corner (again), it's time to start thinking about sending out all those E cards to our loved (and not so loved) ones. This year, why not make your own personalized animated E-card? |
1. First, CRTL+N to open a new doc. Let's make it 640x300. That gives us plenty of room to work with.
2. Right, now we need a background. Click the foreground color (a) and choose a nice blue from the pop up window.
3. Now add the sky:
If you are not happy with the results you can do it again.
4. Click the 'create new layer' icon:
This is going to be our snow. Now we want a nice big brush and white as the foreground color. Click the paint brush tool and choose a nice soft brush.
5. Change the foreground and background colors by clicking the little arrow.
Paint the snow:
6. Now let's add some text. Click the text tool and drag it anywhere you want the text to go:
I've chosen
'www.devclever.com' but obviously, you can type whatever you want.
7. Click the text 3 times to select all of it. Now it's mod time. (Don't you just love the word 'mod'? Makes you feel part of the internet community, whatever that is. Anyhow, change the color, text type, size, whatever makes you feel all warm and glowy inside).
8. Hum. I wanted the text behind the snow. Go to the layers panel and drag the text underneath the snow layer.
9. That's better. Create a new layer by clicking the 'create new layer' icon. It's a good habit to get into to name all your layers. Double click the new layer and call it 'falling snow'.
10. Now take a little small soft brush and paint some snow drops. Careful not to smudge them.
11. Make the brush size smaller (around 7) and then paint smaller snow drops.
12. Now drag the falling snow layer to the 'create new layer' icon. This creates a copy.
13. Click the move tool and with the 'up' arrow on the keyboard move the falling snow copy layer right to the top, off the canvas. Now, making sure that the falling snow copy layer is still selected, (it will be highlighted in blue in the layers panel) press CRTL+E to merge both falling snow layers. This will be our falling snow animation.
14. Hide the falling snow layer by clicking the eye next to it and zoom in on the letters.
They need a bit of snow, too. Click the 'ground snow' layer to highlight it then paint some snow on the letter 'M', like so:
15: Now do the same for all the letters.
Don't forget to zoom out often to see how it looks. Because we are doing it on the 'ground snow' layer we can easily erase something and redo it. Now unhide the 'falling snow' layer by clicking the eye again, and it's off to animate land.
Image ready
16. Press CRTL+SHIFT+M to jump to Imageready. When it has opened, click the little arrow on the animation panel (b), then click 'New Frame' on the roll out menu.
17. Now select the 'falling snow' layer on the layer panel and then the move tool. Using the down arrow on the keyboard, move the layer down .
18. Click the little arrow again and this time choose 'Tween' from the menu. Type 15 for the number of frames to add, accept and hey! you're an animator! You could work for Disney.
19. You can easily add a flying 'Merry Christmas' or anything you want. But how do we send it as an Ecard? Easily! Open up Outlook Express and create a new Email. Click the body of the mail then Go->Insert->Picture and choose the Gif that you have just made. I assume you saved it, right?
20. Now that the image is there and moving, you can add your text, change the background color, whatever you like.
21. One last secret! You can mass mail it to all your friends using the BCC box. BCC means 'blind carbon copy', so your contacts get a copy of the email without the other addresses showing in the 'From' box. When you send it, remember to type your own email address in the 'To' box and you're done!
Rate It!
